Do Energy Efficiency Standards Improve Quality? Evidence from a Revealed Preference Approach

Houde, Sebastien¹  Spurlock, C. Anna² 

[1] Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States);Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

关键词: minimum standards;    energy star;    energy efficiency;    product differentiation;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1235446
RP-ID  :  LBNL--182701
PID  :  OSTI ID: 1235446
Others  :  Other: ir:182701

学科分类：能源（综合）

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

Minimum energy efficiency standards have occupied a central role in U.S. energy policy for more than three decades, but little is known about their welfare effects. In this paper, we employ a revealed preference approach to quantify the impact of past revisions in energy efficiency standards on product quality. The micro-foundation of our approach is a discrete choice model that allows us to compute a price-adjusted index of vertical quality. Focusing on the appliance market, we show that several standard revisions during the period 2001-2011 have led to an increase in quality. We also show that these standards have had a modest effect on prices, and in some cases they even led to decreases in prices. For revision events where overall quality increases and prices decrease, the consumer welfare effect of tightening the standards is unambiguously positive. Finally, we show that after controlling for the effect of improvement in energy efficiency, standards have induced an expansion of quality in the non-energy dimension. We discuss how imperfect competition can rationalize these results.