Energy Consumption in the French Residential Sector: How Much do Individual Preferences Matter?

Salomé Bakaloglou and Dorothée Charlier
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Dorothée CHARLIER ()

The Energy Journal, 2019, vol. Volume 40, issue Number 3

Abstract: The aim of this research is to understand the impact of preference heterogeneity in explaining energy consumption in French homes. Using a discrete-continuous model and the conditional mixed-process estimator (CMP) enable us to address two potential endogeneities in residential energy consumption: energy prices and the choice of home energy characteristics. As a key contribution, we provide evidence that a preference for comfort over saving energy does have significant direct and indirect impacts on energy consumption (through the choice of dwelling), particularly for high-income households. Preferring comfort over economy or one additional degree of heating implies an average energy overconsumption of 10% and 7.8% respectively, up to 18% for high-income households. Our results strengthen the belief that household heterogeneity is an important factor in explaining energy consumption and could have meaningful implications for the design of public policy tools aimed at reducing energy consumption in the residential sector.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=3354 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Energy Consumption in the French Residential Sector: How Much Do Individual Preferences Matter? (2018)
Working Paper: Energy Consumption in the French Residential Sector: How Much do Individual Preferences Matter? (2018)
Working Paper: Energy Consumption in the French Residential Sector: How Much do Individual Preferences Matter? (2018)
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:ej40-3-charlier

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 ().