Energy efficiency, district heating and waste management: essays on environmental economics

Paper [I] investigates the energy efficiency of multi-dwelling buildings in Sweden to find out whether the ownership type matters. More specifically, we investigate whether rental apartment buildings are less energy efficient than cooperative apartment buildings and whether public ownership has a negative impact on energy efficiency. A conceptual framework is presented to illustrate that such differences could be explained by the split incentives problem and deviations from profit maximizing interests. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset that combines data from energy performance certificates with ownership data on residential units. The results indicate that cooperative apartment buildings are significantly more energy efficient than buildings with rental apartments. The results also indicate that publicly owned buildings have somewhat lower energy performance than privately owned ones. Paper [II] Incomplete information may be one reason why some households do not invest in energy efficiency even though it would benefit them to do so. Energy performance certificates (EPCs) have been promoted to overcome such information shortages. In this paper, we investigate whether EPCs together with mandatory home energy audits make households more likely to invest in energy efficiency. Our study takes advantage of the mandatory nature of the EPCs to avoid the potential selection bias problem that typically applies to studies using voluntary energy audits as the treatment. Our treatment group consists of single-family houses in Sweden sold from 2008, i.e., when EPCs became legally required in connection with sales of residential buildings, to 2015; while the control group consists of houses sold between 2002 and 2008, i.e., without an EPC. The results show that there is no statistically significant treatment effect for most of the measures that a household can take to improve the energy performance of their house. The significant treatment effect that we do find concerns a few heating system-related measures. Paper [III] The price of district heating in Sweden is unregulated and differs substantially among different networks. This paper investigates if the price variation can partly be explained by ownership status, i.e., whether the network companies are privately- or municipally-owned. The empirical analysis is based on data on district heating prices, ownership status, and network characteristics for the period 2012-2017. The results show that pr