Valentin Stumpe

Using price variation as a means to control energy consumption has often been proposed as an effective tool to adapt aggregate energy demand to energy supply. However, usually, electricity costs are not fully salient at the time of consumption, as they are not incurred immediately. Using high-frequency household electricity consumption data from a field experiment in Zurich, Switzerland, we first show that providing households with Smart Meters and In-Home-Displays to monitor their electricity consumption reduces domestic energy consumption. Additionally, by exploiting the swiss energy pricing mechanism, we show that feedback provision increases housholds' energy price sensitivity by more than 40 percent. Using a structural framework, we find that due to salience bias, households perceive less than 70 percent of their actual electricity costs. Heterogeneity analyses show that the treatment effect of feedback provision is increasing in pre-treatment baseline energy consumption and In-Home-Display usage. Finally, we observe low-education and low-income households to be stronger biased than their highly educated, high-income counterparts.

Matching unemployed workers to jobs is an important policy agenda. Search effort being a key input to job matching, unemployment policy commonly imposes restrictions regarding the amount and direction of job seekers' effort provision. We study the labor market effects of alleviating these restrictions by investigating a large-scale policy change in the Swiss canton Bern. Over the course of the policy change, the Public Employment Service increased the autonomy of job seekers by reducing job search requirements, abolishing mandatory vacancy referrals, and referring to job seekers as customers. Using detailed administrative data, we find that job search was reduced and became more narrow after the policy change. This came at the cost of an increased average unemployment duration (≈ 8%), but at the benefit of increased re-employment earnings (≈ 2%). Moreover, results show that the local scope for job search externalities is decisive for the average effect of changes in search autonomy.

The transition towards renewable energies in the electricity market crucially depends on the stability of such energy sources. Wind and solar energy are not available at all times, and energy storage options are limited. To offset fluctuations in electricity supply and demand, expensive and inefficient oil and gas plants are used at the moment. Time-varying energy prices have often been proposed to induce consumers to adapt energy demand to energy supply by reflecting the marginal costs of energy provision in the energy price. We base our analysis on hourly household consumption data from 899 households provided by a utility that passes hourly changing wholesale electricity prices on to the consumers. Using hourly wind energy production in Germany as an instrument for the hourly electricity price, we find that households indeed react strongly to real-time pricing. Price reactions are strongest when prices are low, indicating that households evaluate price changes on their relative size to the price. Using different levels of fixed-effects, we find that households react more strongly to price changes over the day than across days, with implied intra- and inter-day price elasticities of 1.67 and 0.45, respectively. Our results indicate that significant load shifts over the day can be achieved by using time-varying energy prices, which opens the possibility to offset consumption and production fluctuations in electricity consumption using monetary incentives.