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Effects of energy performance certificates on investment: A quasi-natural experiment approach

•We test if the Swedish energy performance certificate scheme affects investments in energy efficiency.•We use a quasi-natural experiment and a probit model to estimate treatment effects among owners of single-family houses.•We find no significant overall effect on energy efficiency investments.•We...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Energy economics 2019-10, Vol.84, p.104480, Article 104480
Main Authors: Broberg, Thomas, Egüez, Alejandro, Kažukauskas, Andrius
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:•We test if the Swedish energy performance certificate scheme affects investments in energy efficiency.•We use a quasi-natural experiment and a probit model to estimate treatment effects among owners of single-family houses.•We find no significant overall effect on energy efficiency investments.•We do find significant treatment effects for a few heating system-related measures. Incomplete information may be one reason why some households do not invest in energy efficiency even though it would benefit them to do so. Energy performance certificates (EPCs) have been promoted to overcome such information shortages. In this paper, we investigate whether EPCs together with mandatory home energy audits make households more likely to invest in energy efficiency. Our study takes advantage of the mandatory nature of the EPCs to avoid the potential selection bias problem that typically applies to studies using voluntary energy audits as the treatment. Our treatment group consists of single-household houses in Sweden sold from 2008, i.e., when EPCs became legally required in connection with sales of residential buildings, to 2015; while the control group consists of houses sold between 2002 and 2008, i.e., without an EPC. The results show that there is no statistically significant treatment effect for most of the measures that a household can take to improve the energy performance of their house. The significant treatment effect that we do find concerns a few heating system-related measures.
ISSN:0140-9883
1873-6181
1873-6181
DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2019.104480