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...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper we look at the role of pre-payment (in the context of prepayment metering) for household electricity consumption. Using a matching approach, we find that households paying their electricity up-front tend to consume no less electricity than households paying ex post. This is despite...

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...

The residential demand for energy is growing steadily and the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Household spending on energy services tends to increase with income. We explore household total spending on energy and on electricity and gas separately. We use an extensive...

We use direct evidence on credit constraints to study their importance for household consumption growth and for welfare. We distentangle the direct effect on consumption growth of a currently binding credit constraint from the indirect effect of a potentially binding credit constraint which...