In response to the 1973 oil embargo, many states began passing building energy codes in order to promote energy efficiency. While the vast majority of states have energy codes in place, policymakers are now attempting to legislate energy codes at the federal level to help address more recent...

California's per-capita electricity consumption is 50 percent lower than national per-capita consumption. Mild climate, deindustrialization, and its demographics explain part of this differential. California energy efficiency policy is often claimed to be another key factor. A challenge in...

This paper sets out a framework to evaluate the welfare impacts of residential energy efficiency programs in the presence of imperfect information, behavioral biases, and externalities, then estimates key parameters using a 100,000-household field experiment. Several results run counter to...

The literature has shown the power of social norms to promote residential energy conservation, particularly among high usage users. This study uses a natural field experiment with nearly 200,000 US households to explore whether a financial rewards program can complement such approaches. We...

This paper provides an ex post evaluation of how changes to a building energy code affect energy consumption. Using residential billing data for electricity and natural gas over 11 years, the analysis is based on comparisons between residences constructed just before and just after a building...

Conventional wisdom suggests that energy efficiency (EE) policies are beneficial because they induce investments that pay for themselves and lead to emissions reductions. However, this belief is primarily based on projections from engineering models. This paper reports on the results of an...

State-level building energy codes have been around for over 40 years, but recent empirical research has cast doubt on their effectiveness. A potential virtue of standards-based policies is that they may be less regressive than explicit taxes on energy consumption. However, this conjecture has...

Construction codes that regulate the energy efficiency of new buildings have been a centerpiece of US environmental policy for 40 years. California enacted the nation's first energy building codes in 1978, and they were projected to reduce residential energy use—and associated pollution—by...

Mandatory disclosure policies are increasingly prevalent despite sparse evidence that they improve market outcomes. We study the effects of requiring home sellers to provide buyers with certified audits of residential energy efficiency. Using similar nearby homes as a comparison group, we find...