Description:
In this paper, we investigate the actual impact of building energy efficiency standards, which is one of the most common residential energy efficiency policies across countries. Using a detailed household level data (N=84,864) from Turkey, we estimate the heterogeneous effects of building codes on energy consumption of homes with varying heating technologies. We document that, on average, the building codes lead to around six percent lower heating energy demand for the homes constructed after the regulation. However, among different types of residential heating technologies, the effect is significant for only the homes with central heating systems. The policy has no impact on energy demand for the homes with stoves, individual boilers and electricity based heating systems. Aforementioned result can be partly explained by the potential “rebound" and "pre-bound" effects ensuing from the lower cost of heating in newer dwellings. The significant impact of regulation for the homes with central heating systems can be associated with the mandatory individual meter installation requirement in newer dwellings. The indicated provides an incentive for households to decrease their demand as compared to the older dwellings for which the heating expenditure is shared equally among the households. This result underlines the importance of behavioral interventions in the design of energy saving policies. Overall, our results imply that the effectiveness of residential energy efficiency policies might vary across countries depending on the distribution of different types of heating systems used in the building sector and the economic development levels of the countries