Understanding the spectrum of residential energy-saving behaviours: French evidence using disaggregated data

Belaid Fateh and Thomas Garcia

Energy Economics, 2016, vol. 57, issue C, 204-214

Abstract: Analysing household energy-saving behaviours is crucial to improve energy consumption predictions and energy policy making. How should we quantitatively measure them? What are their determinants? This study explores the main factors influencing residential energy-saving behaviours based on a bottom-up multivariate statistical approach using data from the recent French PHEBUS survey. Firstly, we assess energy-saving behaviours on a one-dimension scale using IRT. Secondly, we use linear regression with an innovative variable selection method via adaptive lasso to tease out the effects of both macro and micro factors on the behavioural score. The results highlight the impact of five main attributes incentivizing energy-saving behaviours based on cross-variable analyses: energy price, household income, education level, age of head of household and dwelling energy performance. In addition, our results suggest that the analysis of the inverted U-shape impact of age enables the expansion of the energy consumption life cycle theory to energy-saving behaviours.

Keywords: Energy-saving behaviours; Residential energy use; Econometric modelling; IRT; Lasso (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D19 Q4 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988316301244
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Understanding the spectrum of residential energy-saving behaviours: French evidence using disaggregated data (2016)
Working Paper: Understanding the spectrum of residential energy-saving behaviours: French evidence using disaggregated data (2015)
Working Paper: Understanding the spectrum of residential energy-saving behaviours: French evidence using disaggregated data (2015)
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:eee:eneeco:v:57:y:2016:i:c:p:204-214

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2016.05.006

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().