Increasing energy efficiency is a key global policy goal for climate protection. An important step towards an optimal reduction of energy consumption is the identification of energy saving potentials in different sectors and the best strategies for increasing efficiency. This paper analyzes...

This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the analogy between the DEA estimator and traditional...

We use the European Community Household Panel, a harmonized data set covering the countries of the European Union, to provide detailed estimates of the returns to education. Our results can be summarized as follows. Firstly, average returns to education have been mostly stable during the second...