Do Consumers Benefit from Energy Efficiency Regulations?
I have a new working paper with Xiaomei (Barbara) Chen, an NCSU graduate student who is on the job market this year, and Larry Dale and Hung-Chia Yang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. LBL does a lot of work on energy efficiency regulations, and they asked us to do some data analysis to accompany new energy efficiency standards that were being proposed by the Department of Energy. They had already done a lot of engineering analysis that typically goes along with these rules. But OMB was looking for an historical account of past standards, particularly the last time DOE increased standards for washers in 2007. This paper comes out of that work. This is a new area of research for me, and this paper could use some additional analysis if we can obtain the right data to do it. But even without that data, I think it presents some fairly compelling evidence that energy efficiency regulations may be beneficial in ways not typically considered Here's the jist