时间：2019年2月26日（周二）10:00—11:30
地点：北京大学经济学院101教室
主讲人：张爽
组织人：张晓波 李力行 席天扬 邢剑炜 刘冲
主持人：刘冲
题目：Setting the Price Right: Evidence from Heating Price Reform in China
摘要：
Inefficient energy pricing and the lack of incentives to conserve energy are common problems in developing countries and result in substantial allocative inefficiency. We evaluate a recent major reform in the residential heating system in China that replaced a non-metered fixed payment system with a two-part tariff , called consumption-based billing. We develop an event-study research design that exploits quasi-experimental variation in the staggered rollouts of the reform over ten years. Using household-level daily heating usage data before and after the reform, we find that the reform induced substantial reduction in heating usage, by 37 percent reduction in four years. We also find evidence of learning. Households reduced heating usage gradually over time, with larger reduction in warmer days (i.e. days when the value of heating was relatively low) in later years. We then use plant-level emission data to examine environmental benefits of the reform. The reduced heating usage was associated with 35 percent reduction in SO2 emission concentration. We use these results to calculate the reduction in deadweight loss that was produced by the policy. Our findings provide important implications for energy policy because a growing number of developing countries are in the process of implementing consumption-based energy billing in lieu of pre-existing inefficient fixed-charge billing.
主讲人介绍：
Professor Zhang is an Assistant Professor from Department of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University, M.A. in Economics from Fudan University, and B.A. in Economics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Her current research interests include the relationship between education and health, particularly parental education and child health; impact of the land reform in China on the sex ratio imbalance; long-term impact of the land reform on academic performance; the One Child Policy; environment and health. Her recent works have been published in leading academic journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Journal of Political Economy .
https://spot.colorado.edu/~shzh6533/
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