Price Environments and Residence-Duration Profiles in Residential Heating Expenditures: Evidence from Germany

Tilman Schaefer

No 1238, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Heating-expenditure profiles over a residential spell vary systematically with aggregate gas price environments. Using 30 years of German SOEP panel data with 16,055 residential spells among renter households, this paper estimates a negative cross-derivative of log heating and hot-water expenditures per square meter with respect to residence duration and the log gas price index (δ = -0.0045, bootstrap p = 0.003) in a residential spell and year fixed-effects design. The implied cumulative difference amounts to roughly 1.8 percent over ten years. Flexible specifications reveal offsetting effects across duration horizons, with positive moderation in the early years giving way to negative moderation at longer horizons. The continuous interaction estimate is stable across alternative price measures and sample restrictions, whereas flexible specifications indicate that price moderation is not well summarized by a single constant-slope shift. The results show that heterogeneity in heating expenditures is not only a matter of household characteristics or building quality, but also of where households stand within a residential spell.

Keywords: Residential energy demand; Residence-duration; Price environments; Germany; SOEP panel data; High-dimensional fixed effects models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D12 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 p.
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.1010439.de/diw_sp1238.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1238

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().