Is There a Win-Win Situation in Household Energy Policy

To achieve environmental goals, most governments aim to reduce consumption of the most polluting energy goods by taxation. Often, the authorities not only aim to change the consumption of the regulated good by the taxation, but also to change the consumption of close substitutes (hereafter referred to as win-win effects). The size of the win-win effects depend not only on how close substitutes the goods are, but also on the price sensitivity of the taxed good and on the budget effects of the regulation. We use a conditional demand model to decompose the cross-price effect to discuss which criteria that must be fulfilled in order for substantial win-win effects to occur, using Norwegian stationary energy consumption as an empirical example.