Many studies have been focusing on the impact of the shale gas boom on our society, but the reverse relationship is not well documented. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of oil and gas prices on shale gas drilling activities. We analyze the well-level production data from all major producing shale gas plays in the United States (US) and identify a major productivity shock in 2009. We then estimate the price elasticity of shale gas drilling using the econometric methods.

The Government of Nepal has been providing subsidies to promote biogas technology since the 1970s and Solar Home Systems (SHS) since the 1990s. This study uses nationally representative survey data to examine the extent to which these subsidies benefitted the rural poor.

This study evaluates the distribution of electricity subsidies to residential customers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2016 that results from the current increasing block tariff (IBT) structure. Customer billing data supplied by the electricity utility were matched with socioeconomic information collected from a survey of 987 households, and used with a utility-specific estimate of the costs of electricity service to estimate household-specific subsidies.

China’s rapid urbanization and increasing energy use are accompanied by deteriorating environmental quality. Understanding the structure of energy use is necessary to address these environmental effects. We investigate how urbanization affects residential energy use, using data from the Chinese Residential Energy Consumption Survey 2012 (CRECS 2012) to compare the energy consumption of urban and rural households and identify the factors influencing the differences.

In recent years, the coal intensity of electricity generation and its change rate over time has varied significantly across coal-fired power plants in China. This paper decomposes the coal intensity change into four components: technological catch-up, technological progress, change in capital-coal ratio, and change in labor-coal ratio.

We use behavioural insights to design nudges, leveraging social comparison and assignment of responsibility, aimed at reducing electricity consumption in a large provincial government office building with 24 floors, a total of 1008 occupants. Results from a randomized control trial show that floors participating in a treatment with inter-floor competitions and tips reduced energy consumption by 9%, while those that also included floor-wise “energy advocates” reduced energy consumption by 14% over a period of 5 months.

The shale gas boom in the United States has been reforming the world energy market. The supply response of shale gas to productivity shocks and relative price changes, however, has not been adequately studied. We analyze the change in price responsiveness of shale gas drilling using well-level data covering all major producing reservoirs in the United States. Shale gas drilling becomes more responsive to energy prices after the major productivity shock in 2009.

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott
and Rogers (2014) show that social comparison-based home energy reports
(HER) are a cost-effective climate policy intervention in the US. Our paper demonstrates
the context-dependency of this result. In most industrialized countries,
average electricity consumption and carbon intensity are well below US levels.
Consequently, HER interventions can only become cost-effective if treatment effect

Having a reliable supply of electricity is essential for the operation of any firm. In most developing countries, however, electricity supply is highly unreliable. In this study, we estimate the cost of power outages for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, using a stated preference survey. We find that the willingness to pay, and thus the cost of power outages, is substantial. The estimated willingness to pay for a reduction of one power outage corresponds to a tariff increase of 16 percent.