An increasing number of households in Northern Ireland has started to collect oil stamps in recent years - i.e. small pieces of paper which can be purchased at specified outlets, collected on an oil stamps savings card, and used to pay in full or part for one's oil bill. In this paper, we...

It is a well established fact that electricity use increases with income. What is less well known is that - despite the positive correlation between electricity use and income - a significant portion of low-income households consume very large amounts of electricity. In this paper, we make a...

In this paper, we revisit the problem of self-disconnection among prepayment energy customers. Using metering data from 2.3 million electricity pre-payment customers, we study how often households with an electricity pre-payment meter tend to self-disconnect over the course of a year - and why...

In the matter of financial literacy it is often supposed that more is automatically preferable to less. This paper considers to what extent this may be true generally, and specifically focuses on the case of investment forecasting skill (a significant component of an individual's financial...

The “less-developed” interior of early modern Europe, especially the rural economy, is often regarded as financially comatose. This paper investigates this view using a rich dataset of marriage and death inventories for seventeenth-century Germany. It first analyzes how borrowing varied with...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

The main research question in this paper is whether the installation rate of solar pv technology is affected by social spillovers from spatially close households. The installed base, defined as the cumulative number of solar v installations within a neighbourhood by the end of a particular...

Renewable energy sources have a critical role to play in contributing to the diversity, sustainability and security of energy supplies. The main objectives of the paper is to gain an understanding of UK households’preferences for the type of mechanism that is used to support renewables. Two...

Expenditure on environmentally sensitive goods and services has been analysed for the member states of the EEC, using the EUROSTAT Family Budgets data based on surveys carried out in 1988. Some data are also available from Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The groups with low...

This note describes the matching procedure used to construct panel data sets from the 1987, 1989 and 1991 Hungarian Household Budget servey samples.