No abstract

Financial support of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant is gratefully acknowledged. Metaxoglou completed parts of this project while visiting CEEPR at MIT and he thanks the Center for their hospitality. We thank Patrick Higgins for providing us with an updated investment deflator series. We thank Nadav Ben Zeev, Garth Heutel, Lutz Killian, Aaron Smith, Jim Stock, and seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, for comments. The usual disclaimer applies. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

This paper quantifies a tenant-side "split incentives" problem that exists when the largest commercial sector customers are on electricity-included property lease contracts causing them to face a marginal electricity price of zero. We use exogenous variation in weather shocks to show that the largest firms on tenant-paid contracts use up to 14 percent less electricity in response to summer temperature fluctuations. The result is retrieved under weaker identifying assumptions than previous split incentives papers, and is robust when exposed to several opportunities to fail. The electricity reduction in response to temperature increases is likely to be a lower bound when generalized nationwide and suggests that policymakers should consider a sub-metering policy to expose the largest commercial tenants to the prevailing retail electricity price.

Solid fuel burning in households is a leading health risk for people in developing countries. Several studies of indoor air pollution from solid fuels have analyzed the problem at the village and household level, but to design effective policies it is important to understand the large-scale socioeconomic drivers of household air pollution (HAP). Using county-level data covering all of China, we examine relationships between socioeconomic variables and ambient concentrations of PM and SO2 resulting from household energy use. Applying both non-parametric and parametric techniques, we find that income and education are robust determinants of HAP; structural characteristics affect the HAP turning points; and the poorest counties bear a disproportionate amount of total pollution, especially urban counties and counties located in the coastal provinces.

Financial support of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant is gratefully acknowledged. Metaxoglou completed parts of this project while visiting CEEPR at MIT and he thanks the Center for their hospitality. We thank Patrick Higgins for providing us with an updated investment deflator series. We thank Nadav Ben Zeev, Garth Heutel, Lutz Killian, Aaron Smith, Jim Stock, and seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, for comments. The usual disclaimer applies. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.