Dokument

Summary:
Based on data of more than 3700 citizens in Germany, this paper empirically examines the relevance of several groups of explanatory factors for electricity consumption. Besides con-trolling for individual housing and dwelling characteristics as well as socio-demographics, we analyze the effect of environmentally-related values and norms. Since behavioral economics reveals the importance of economic preferences for many individual activities, we additional-ly consider time and risk preferences, altruism, trust, and reciprocity in our econometric anal-ysis. With respect to the latter factors, only patience has a significantly negative effect on electricity consumption. Our estimation results instead suggest a high relevance of individual housing and dwelling characteristics and socio-demographics. The most interesting result is probably that neither environmentally-related values such as ecological policy identification and environmental awareness nor environmentally-related social norms have a significant effect. In contrast to the USA and to the demand for green electricity in Germany, these esti-mation results suggest that citizens in Germany with strong environmental identity do not consider low electricity consumption as an important direction for environmental and climate protection.

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