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Energy and climate policy 4
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Presentations | ||
Corporate responses to public pressures and price increases: Evidence from Japan’s electricity crisis 1Osaka University of Economics, Japan; 2Nagoya University, Japan; 3Kyoto Univeristy, Japan The behaviors of non-residential electricity customers during power crises have been underinvesti- gated. This study explores corporate responses during Japan’s electricity crisis after the 2011 earthquake using firm-level microdata. The earthquake provided a natural experiment to examine the effect of public pressures and price increases on firms’ electricity consumption during the associated power crisis. Using a DID model, we show that firms’ electricity consumption was overall elastic to public pressures in the short term but inelastic to price changes. However, power conservation due to public pressures was implemented by only 32% of firms. In other words, the remaining 68% were free-riders, whose electricity consumption was actually elastic to price. The results indicate that it is important for policy makers to use both economic and non-economic interventions to promptly induce conservation by as many firms as possible during power crises as firms tend to respond to either of the policy instruments. Making Jobs out of the Energy Transition: Evidence from the French Energy Efficiency Obligations Scheme 1MinesParisTech, France; 2Universitat de Barcelona, Institut d'Economia de Barcelona, Spain Vast amounts are being invested in the energy transition worldwide, with optimistic expectations of economic growth and green job creation. Yet, we crucially lack ex-post validations of the multiplier effects widely used to quantify new green jobs. Focusing on the French Energy Efficiency Obligations scheme, this paper provides the first ex-post estimate of the employment effect of a large energy-retrofit investment program. We exploit a discontinuity in the provision of subsidies and use a novel synthetic control method on disaggregated data to estimate regional-level employment effects. We estimate that the scheme created 1.4 jobs per million euros invested. Carbon Abatement Costs in German Manufacturing 1Unviersity of East Anglia, United Kingdom; 2University of Basel, Switzerland We provide firm-level estimates of the marginal cost of abatement for German manufacturing firms between 2003 and 2018 using administrative data. We compute the shadow value of reducing CO2 emissions for 704 firms regulated under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We describe the evolution of the abatement costs across industries and over time, tracking the impact of changes in the policy design and its stringency on the behaviour of the firms in our panel. Our findings imply that marginal abatement costs stayed relatively constant following the introduction of the EU ETS and did not converge over time. We observe a large heterogeneity within and across industries and find that firms with low abatement costs reduced their emission intensity. However, those firms did not sell more allowances than firms with high abatement costs, suggesting that there still exist significant gains from trading allowances. These results provide valuable information for policymakers in the European Union and beyond on the actual level of the costs imposed by climate change policy, and its distributional impacts across firms and industries. Temperature Sensitivity of Residential Electricity Demand on the Global Scale: A Bayesian Partial Pooling Model 1Institute for Environmental, Resource and Spatial Economics, Kiel University, Germany; 2Department of Economics, University of Sussex, UK; 3Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands This paper adds to the sparse literature investigating the temperature sensitivity of residential electricity demand on a global scale. In contrast to previous studies, we use a Bayesian partial pooling model to estimate individual intercepts and individual slopes for each country and focus on different representations of non-linear temperature response functions. Our dataset covers data for 110 countries and for the period 1990 to 2021. We find that as temperatures rise above 25°C, a positive relationship can be observed between the estimates of the countries’ slopes and their intercepts. We also observe a discrepancy between more developed countries and less developed countries, where the former are more sensitive to these high temperatures and the latter are less sensitive. These findings further reinforce the idea that poor countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change. |