Energy efficiency improvements have become a major hope for decoupling the energy demand from economic growth and for achieving environmental goals. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of policies based on promoting energy efficiency may be undermined by behavioral responses. A more efficiently...

What do we know about the size of the rebound effect? Should we believe claims that energy efficiency improvements lead to an increase in energy use? This paper clarifies what the rebound effect is, and provides a guide for economists and policymakers interested in its magnitude. We describe how...

Improvements in cars' fuel efficiency may induce people to travel more, taking back some of the potential fuel savings. This behavior, known as the (direct) rebound effect, has received much attention in the literature. However, no consensus has been reached regarding its size or the methodology...

This paper investigates demand responses to variations in the characteristics of the vehicles. Our investigation is based on number of sales for each model marketed over the period 2006-2015 in Switzerland, and puts particular emphasis on fuel efficiency, curb weight, horsepower, and the...

Price elasticity estimates of residential electricity demand vary widely across the economic literature. In this paper, we seek to explain these findings using three nationwide datasets – the American Housing Survey, Forms EIA-861, and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey – from the...

We estimate the rebound effect for private transportation using cross-section micro-level data in Switzerland for 2010. Our simultaneous equations model accounts for endogeneity of travel distance, vehicle fuel intensity and vehicle weight. Compared to the literature, our paper provides an...

This thesis consists of four papers: two of them deal with the relationship between consumption, energy taxation, and emissions on macro level, and two of them focus on the effects of changes in consumption and income on the environmental quality on a micro level. <p> The main objective of paper...</p>

We focus on two utility programs intended to reduce energy usage and the associated CO2 emissions-a home energy audit and rebates on the purchase of high-efficiency air-source heat pumps. We use a unique panel dataset from participating and non-participating households to estimate the average...

This paper evaluates an intervention that randomized information letters about energy efficient investments and behaviors among 120,000 customers of two utilities in Germany. We find that conservation effects differ considerably between both utilities, ranging from a precisely estimated zero...

Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias...