Are Federal Energy Tax Credits Effective? A Western United States Survey

Edwin H. Carpenter and S. Theodore Chester, Jr.

The Energy Journal, 1984, vol. Volume 5, issue Number 2, 139-149

Abstract: The residential energy credit provided by the federal Energy Tax Act (1977) cannot be carried beyond December 31, 1987, and the Reagan administration has indicated a disinclination to support an extension of its provisions, in either its current or an altered form. Its likely demise indicates nothing about the Act's effectiveness in getting homeowners to invest in energy conservation or solar devices. Rather, it is a reflection of the Reagan philosophy of letting market conditions determine energy conservation decisions. Since the administration is not explicitly passing judgment on the success or failure of residential tax credits, important questions regarding their efficacy remain to be answered. This paper will attempt to shed light on this question. It will examine data derived from a random sample of Western United States homeowners to determine awareness and use of the federal energy tax credit; the role of climate and dwelling type; and the influence of selected socioeconomic factors on the use of energy tax credits. Most important, it will seek to determine the extent to which conservation decisions were contingent on the availability of the tax credits, i, e., what proportion of investments were made wholly or predominantly because of their special tax inducements and what proportion would have been made in any case.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1644 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

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:aen:journl:1984v05-02-a10

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().