Abstract
Multilateral climate agreements are more likely to be successful when they acknowledge and address both differences in country energy use behavior and the factors that shape behavior. This paper employs an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to analyze factors underlying differences in residential energy use behavior in Germany and the USA. We focus on three household decisions: purchasing energy-efficient appliances, employing energy-saving measures like turning off lights when leaving a room, and purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles. For all of these decisions, US household adoption is significantly lower than German household adoption. These differences in observed energy use behavior are decomposed into components arising from differences in country mean characteristic and from differences in adoption propensities for given characteristics. Both country characteristics and propensities contribute to observed energy use behavior differences in German and US households. In particular, perceptions of the human role in climate change, financial advantages of energy savings, and effectiveness of energy savings in combating climate change play significant roles in generating observed country difference.
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Notes
Errors are ignored in the specification of the decomposition, as their expected means equal zero.
Urban and Ščasný (2016) find in a multi-country study that the distinction between conservation (curtailment) and efficiency is not empirically valid. This analysis does not attempt to identify distinctions between the two types of energy use behavior.
The survey data has been used, among others, in Schleich et al. (2014) to study the relevance of perceptions of climate policy to planned voluntary climate protection activities, and in Schleich and Faure (2017) to analyze cross-country differences in individual perceptions of climate policy relevance.
Sample size varies slightly the energy-efficient appliance purchase, use of energy saving practices at home, and energy-efficient automobile purchase samples due to additional slight differences in missing values for these variables. Descriptive statistics in table 1 are for the energy-efficient appliance purchase sample.
Conservative methods are employed to calculate average incomes. Thus, the income data reported from the survey is expected to be a lower value than that in census data.
We focus on estimates that are statistically significant at least at p = 0.05 in a two-tailed t test.
The endowment term differences employ the US coefficient to determine the impact of the variable mean differences. The coefficient term differences employ the US variable mean responses to determine the impact of the variable parameter estimate differences.
The endowment term decomposition again employs the US model coefficient estimates to determine the impact of the variable mean differences. The coefficient term differences employ US variable means to determine the impact of the variable parameter estimate differences.
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Acknowledgements
Data was collected within a project titled “The Relevance of Voluntary Efforts and Fairness Preferences for the Success of International Climate Policy: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis at the Individual Level” (VolFair). VolFair is supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) under the funding priority “Economics of climate change” (grant number 01 LA 1123 B). We thank Elisabeth Dütschke, Claudia Schwirplies, and Andreas Ziegler for their substantial contribution to the design and implementation of the survey. Long was supported though a US NSF Division of Chemistry Award (1560240) Research Experience for Undergraduates summer fellowship at Virginia Tech.
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This article is part of the topical collection “Energy and Climate Economic Modeling”
Guest editors “Milan Ščasný and Anna Alberini”
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Long, C., Mills, B.F. & Schleich, J. Characteristics or culture? Determinants of household energy use behavior in Germany and the USA. Energy Efficiency 11, 777–798 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-017-9596-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-017-9596-2