tailieunhanh - Energy Use By Apartment Tenants When Landlords Pay For Utilities

`Am I telling you something you don't know when I tell you that I've been head over heels in love with you since you were a kid with bobbed hair?' What did one say to that? One laughed brightly. `Oh, Edgar, what nonsense you talk.' `You're the most beautiful creature I've ever seen in my life and the most delightful. Of course I knew I hadn't a chance. I was twenty-five years older than you. A contemporary of your father's. I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that when you were a girl you looked upon me as a funny. | Energy Use By Apartment Tenants When Landlords Pay For Utilities February 2003 Arik Levinson Georgetown University and NBER Scott Niemann Charles River Associates Abstract Energy costs are included in the monthly rent of more than one-fourth of . apartment residents. Because these tenants do not face the marginal cost of their own energy use they have little incentive to use energy efficiently. Explanations for this apparent market failure fall into two categories the tenants value such arrangements more than they value the extra energy they consume or the landlords value the arrangements more than the cost of that extra energy. We use data from the . Department of Energy s Residential Energy Consumption Survey and the Census Bureau s American Housing Survey to estimate energy consumption by tenants in utility-included apartments and the rent premium for those apartments. While market rents for utility-included apartments are higher than for otherwise similar metered apartments the difference is smaller than the cost of the energy used a finding that supports landlord-side explanations. Key Words energy efficiency average-cost pricing utilities JeL Codes Q4 L85 L97 Acknowledgments We thank Gib Metcalf Don Fullerton John Karl Scholz Steve Malpezzi Greg Watson and two anonymous referees for especially constructive comments and the National Science Foundation SES-9905576 for financial support to Levinson during part of this research. Introduction More than one-fourth of rental apartments in the . have the cost of utilities included in their rent. Because tenants in these apartments choose how much energy to use after the monthly rent has been determined they have no price incentive to conserve energy and therefore use more energy than tenants in otherwise similar individually metered apartments. Moreover the cost of the extra energy use if added to tenants monthly rent will be more than tenants would be willing to pay for that energy separately. Tenants or .