Massimo Filippini

• PhD in Economics; Full professor
• Professor (Full) at ETH Zurich

Electrification of the private passenger transport sector is a fundamental milestone in reducing global carbon emissions. To reach this goal, several governments introduced a series of incentive programs to encourage the adoption of battery-electric vehicles (BEVs). Two of the most widespread policies to incentivize the adoption of BEVs are discoun...

Retirement savings decisions are increasingly mediated by digital technologies that promise to help individuals plan adequately for their retirement. We exploit a natural experiment to show that introducing a digital pension application increases the probability of making a voluntary retirement contribution by 1.8 percentage points, from an average...

Replacing combustion engine vehicles with battery electric vehicles (BEV) is essential to achieving climate objectives and advancing sustainable transportation, aligning with the United Nations Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. In this project, we identify three perception biases linked to EV adoption and address them with personalized non...

To overcome the inherent clash between the ever-increasing push for electrification in the transportation and heating sectors, and the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, demand response solutions such as direct load control (DLC) tariffs are receiving growing attention from researchers and policymakers. The present study aims to inves...

Vehicle accidents represent an important source of externalities from driving. Using a detailed dataset on accident location and characteristics in Switzerland, we estimate the effect of switching from a 50 km/h speed limit to a 30 km/h limit on the probability of Vehicle accident injuries. After an initial country-wide analysis, we exploit the qua...

Isolating the role of limited knowledge, psychological frictions and policy characteristics is key when evaluating a public program and designing future policies. We document limited awareness about the presence of fiscal incentives towards fuel efficient vehicles. Exploiting a direct measure of awareness at the individual level, we find vehicle ch...

Buildings are responsible for around 45% of total energy consumption and one-third of CO2 emissions annually in Switzerland. Policymakers have argued that an increased rate of energy-saving retrofits in existing buildings will play a critical role in meeting the energy and climate policy goals. This article examines the determinants for the househo...

Whether consumers are fully informed and attentive when investing in energy efficiency is still hotly debated. We experimentally evaluate the role of imperfect information about or limited attention to energy costs in the demand for energy-consuming household durables in Switzerland. Using in-home visits, we collect unique data on the characteristi...

Previous efforts exploring options to increase residential sector's energy efficiency have overlooked that highlighting co-benefits associated with energy efficiency may represent a promising strategy to draw attention from decision makers. For instance, in addition to savings in energy costs, buildings equipped with energy saving and comfort venti...

In this paper, we compare the total energy consumption of households living in green certified buildings with households living in conventional buildings based on the example of the Swiss Minergie label. For this purpose, we estimate an econometric total energy demand model using a panel data set comprised of around 1500 households observed over th...

Consumers' limitations in assessing the lifetime cost of household appliances may sustain the much-cited energy efficiency gap. We analyse the impact of an individual's energy and investment literacy and two different types of decision support on the ability to identify the appliance with the lower lifetime cost in an online randomized controlled t...

Enhancing nursing home efficiency and productivity is a challenging task for health policy makers due to population ageing trends and increasing healthcare costs. In this study, we analyse nursing home efficiency and productivity using data from the universe of Swiss nursing homes for the period 2007–2015. We estimate a translog cost frontier via g...

In this paper, we estimate the price elasticity of residential electricity consumption in Switzerland using a unique longitudinal household survey of around 5000 households. The survey contains information on a household's stock of appliances, use of appliances, and various socio-demographic characteristics. Our empirical model is derived from a va...

Voluntary approaches to environmental policy can contribute to stemming environmental degradation in developing countries with weak institutions. We evaluate the role of a lack of awareness of a law in explaining the voluntary adoption of environmental certification by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the food and beverage industry in Vietnam...

Addressing hazardous levels of air pollution in densely populated cities in emerging countries requires concerted efforts to reduce fossil fuel use in the transport sector, such as through greater use of electric motorcycles. However, their adoption has been limited due to several market failures and behavioral anomalies. In this study, we collect...

The Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have a key role to play in understanding which factors and policies would motivate, encourage and enable different actors to adopt a wide range of sustainable energy behaviours and support the required system changes and policies. The SSH can provide critical insights into how consumers could be empowered to...

In this paper, we analyze the level of efficiency in the use of electricity in the European residential sector relying on a cross-sectional data set comprised of 1375 households located in Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland and observed in 2016. To do this, we estimate an electricity demand frontier function using a stochastic frontier approac...

The global mobility system is very important for the economy and the well-being of society. In parallel, passenger and freight transport exhibit a high demand for space, infrastructure and energy resources, while they may have negative impacts on the environment, specifically through noise and pollutant emissions. Of particular importance however i...

In manufacturing industries, occupational health and safety measures ensure better working conditions for employees, which may influence their productivity. We study the impact of investments undertaken by small and medium enterprises in Vietnam in mitigating indoor pollution (including air quality improvements, heat and noise protection as well as...

Smart meters can promote behavioral changes and water conservation by improving information and providing feedback about water consumption to households. In this paper, we evaluate a large-scale programme implemented by the municipal water company of La Laguna (Tenerife). Exploiting quasi-experimental variation brought about program, we estimate th...

El impacto de los contadores inteligentes en el consumo de agua residencia: Evidencia de un experimento natural en las Islas Canarias 1 RESUMEN EN ESPAÑOL En este artículo recogemos los resultados de analizar como un experimento natural la implantación extensiva de sistemas de lectura remota para medir el consumo de agua (telelectura a través d...

We provide an empirical analysis on the relation between culture and revealed environmental preferences. Switzerland's citizens share the same set of institutions but belong to multiple population groups, which differ by culture and language across distinct geographical locations. This unique setting allows us to disentangle the effect of culture o...

In this article, we analyse the gas demand of Swiss households and provide an estimate of the own price elasticity. We use household-level panel data from 2010 to 2014 for 958 Swiss households while controlling for several socioeconomic characteristics and dwelling attributes. The results report the own price elasticity of gas demand to be around –...

As countries develop, they are likely to face challenges in meeting growing energy demand and in ensuring energy security. Given this, and the problem of climate change, improving demand-side energy efficiency is pivotal to ensuring sustainable development. However, agents often underinvest in energy-efficient technologies due to behavioral failure...

We study the impact of a national energy efficiency program on total factor productivity (TFP) growth in firms in China's iron and steel industry. Using detailed firm-level survey data and multiple approaches to estimate program effects, we find participating firms experienced greater annualized TFP change. Our base specification estimates the prog...

From both health and environmental policy perspectives, it is advisable to ensure that individuals maximize the nutritional gains from eating meat, without having a significantly adverse environmental impact, i.e. sustainable meat consumption pathways are imperative. This is especially true for developing countries, where rising incomes and growing...

Ambient air pollution is the environmental factor with the most significant impact on human health. Several epidemiological studies provide evidence for an association between ambient air pollution and human health. However, the recent economic literature has challenged the identification strategy used in these studies. This paper contributes to th...

Isolating the role of limited knowledge, psychological frictions and policy characteristics is key when evaluating a public program and designing future policies. This paper explores the role of awareness about the presence of fiscal programs in determining their impact on individual choices. Our identification strategy exploits quasi-experimental...

Efficiency measurement in the electricity and gas distribution sectors

A longstanding interest from environmental economists on winter outdoor recreation has overlooked activities practiced outside the boundaries of winter resorts—e.g. ski mountaineering. This paper implements the Travel Cost Method to estimate consumer surplus per season derived from ski mountaineering and snowshoeing in Val Bedretto—a valley located...

China's 11 th Five-Year Plan introduced various policy instruments to address carbon mitigation; however, the ex-post policy impacts need to be investigated in a scientific and systematic way to guide future policy design. In this paper, we estimate the impacts of the heat metering and energy efficiency retrofitting policy (HMEER) on residential en...

Introduction More than 60% of the energy end-use consumption in Switzerland originates from fossil fuels. In 2014, the residential sector consumed nearly 30% of the total final energy consumption in Switzerland and about 58% of the energy end-use consumption of households was based on fossil fuels (BFE, 2015). Improving the energy efficiency in th...

Households make an investment analysis when buying new electrical appliances. Therefore, expectations about future electricity consumption may have an impact on current consumption and investment decisions. Dynamic partial adjustment models of residential electricity demand neglect rational consumer behaviour. In this paper we propose a model for r...

In this paper, we measure the energy efficiency implicit in residential energy consumption using a panel dataset comprised of 40,246 observations from US households observed over 1997–2009. We fit a stochastic frontier model of the minimum input of energy needed to meet the level of energy services demanded by the household. This benchmarking exerc...

This note shows that, if a Bivariate Probit (BP) model is estimated on data arising from a Recursive Bivariate Probit (RBP) process, the resulting BP correlation parameter is a weighted average of the RBP correlation parameter and the parameter associated to the endogenous binary variable. Two corollaries follow this proposition: i) the interpretat...

Electricity prices on the European market have decreased significantly over the past few years, resulting in a deterioration of Swiss hydropower firms’ competitiveness and profitability. One option to improve the sector’s competitiveness is to increase cost efficiency. The goal of this study is to quantify the level of persistent and transient cost...

The article Measuring persistent and transient energy efficiency in the US, written by Massimo Filippini and Lester C. Hunt, was originally published Online First without open access.

We estimate the short- and long-run elasticities of electricity demand in Switzerland using a dynamic model of residential electricity consumption incorporating a correction introduced by Kiviet. We find that the short-run elasticity of residential demand for electricity in Switzerland is around −0.3 while the long-run elasticity is around −0.6. Ou...

The productive efficiency of a firm can be decomposed into two parts, one persistent and one transient. This distinction seems to be appealing for regulators. During the last decades, public utilities such as water and electricity have witnessed a wave of regulatory reforms aimed at improving efficiency through incentive regulation. Most of these r...

This paper estimates the level of transient and persistent efficiency in the use of electricity in Swiss households using the newly developed generalized true random effects model (GTREM). An unbalanced panel dataset of 1994 Swiss households from 2010 to 2014 collected via a household survey is used to estimate an electricity demand frontier functi...

Previous evaluations of emissions-based car taxes have estimated their impact on the shares or sales of new vehicles. In contrast, we ask whether taxes that penalize high emitters induce changes in the retirement of existing and inefficient vehicles. We exploit natural experiment conditions in Switzerland to analyze the impact of three different “b...

This short piece introduces the contributions of the supplemental issue "7th Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics". We have grouped the papers, which show a large thematic and methodological diversity, in three areas under a common theme: global views, the role of innovation, and national approaches to inform policies in the tran...

It is an ongoing debate how to increase the adoption of energy-efficient light bulbs and household appliances in the presence of the so-called ‘energy efficiency gap’. One measure to support consumers’ decision-making towards the purchase of more efficient appliances is the display of energy-related information in the form of energy-efficiency labe...

In this paper we use panel data from a survey conducted on 30 utilities in Switzerland to estimate the impact of demand-side management (DSM) activity on residential electricity demand. Using the variation in DSM activity within utilities and across utilities over time we identify the impact of DSM programs and find that their presence reduces per...

China is one of the largest energy consumers and CO2 emitters globally. The growth rate of energy consumption in China is about 6 % per year, and it consumed 21 % of the world’s total energy in 2012. In recent years, the Chinese government decided to introduce several energy policy instruments to promote energy efficiency. For instance, the reducti...

By means of a single-bounded, referendum format contingent valuation, this paper estimates willingness to pay (WTP) for improved air quality among residents of Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). Findings from this paper illustrate heterogeneity in WTP associated with environmental and social attitudes, and family concerns. For instance, WTP is h...

Widespread issues regarding quality in nursing homes call for an improved understanding of the relationship with costs. This relationship may differ in European countries, where care is mainly delivered by nonprofit providers. In accordance with the economic theory of production, we estimate a total cost function for nursing home services using dat...

In order to reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change, several countries around the world have introduced a CO2 tax on energy consumption. Switzerland has already introduced a CO2 tax on gas and heating oil and is considering introducing a CO2 tax on gasoline and diesel as well. The effectiveness of such a tax depends on the level of the sho...

Inadequate information is often identified as a potential cause for the so-called "energy efficiency gap," i.e., the sluggish pace of investment in energy efficiency technologies, which potentially affects a wide variety of energy-using goods, including road vehicles. To improve the fuel economy of vehicles, in 2003 Switzerland introduced a system...

It is an ongoing debate how to increase the adoption of energy-efficient light bulbs and household appliances in the presence of the so-called ’energy efficiency gap’. One measure to support consumers’ decision-making towards the purchase of more efficient appliances is the display of energy-related information in the form of energy-efficiency labe...

In this paper we use panel data from a survey conducted on 30 Swiss utilities to estimate the impact of demand-side management (DSM) activities on residential electricity demand using DSM spending and an energy efficiency score. Using the variation in DSM activities within utilities and across utilities over time we identify the impact of these pro...

Many countries have adopted policies designed to reduce CO2 emissions from road vehicles. Taxes linked to the CO2 emissions rate or the fuel economy of a vehicle (which is inversely related to its CO2 emissions rate) are examples of such policies. These taxes are usually imposed on new vehicles, and previous evaluations have estimated the increases...

The purpose of this study is to assess differences in the levels of cost efficiency of bus lines operated under competitively tendered contracts and performance-based negotiated contracts. Following the revision of the Swiss railways act in 1996, regional public authorities were given the choice between two different contractual regimes to procure...

In this paper, we estimate the impact of rebate policies in various US states on the sales share of ENERGY STAR household appliances. We use annual ENERGY STAR sales data for clothes washers, dishwashers, refrigerators and air conditioners from 2001 to 2006 and the variation in the coverage of rebates across US states and over time to identify the...

The promotion of US energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity. Generally, the level of energy efficiency of a country or state is approximated by energy intensity, commonly calculated as the ratio of energy use to GDP. However, energy intensity is not an accurate proxy for energy efficiency given that changes in energy intensity...

Population aging is challenging governments to find new solutions to finance the increasing demand for nursing home care and slow down the increase in expenditures. In this light, many European countries are currently considering reforms to increase efficiency in the provision of nursing home services. One popular restructuring policy is the transf...

Energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by almost all policy makers. In practical energy policy analysis, the typical indicator used as a proxy for energy efficiency is energy intensity. However, this simple indicator is not necessarily an accurate measure given changes in energy intensity are a function of changes in several...

This paper brings attention to the fact that the energy demand frontier model introduced by Filippini and Hunt (2011, 2012) is closely connected to the measurement of the so-called rebound effect associated with improvements in energy efficiency. In particular, we show that their model implicitly imposes a zero rebound effect, which contradicts mos...

Energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by almost all policy makers. In practical energy policy analysis, the typical indicator used as a proxy for energy efficiency is energy intensity. However, this simple indicator is not necessarily an accurate measure given changes in energy intensity are a function of changes in several...

The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential effects of unobserved heterogeneity on the cost efficiency measurement of electricity distribution systems within the framework of incentive regulation schemes such as price- or revenue cap. In particular, we decompose the benchmarking process into two steps: In the first step, we attempt to ide...

Several countries around the world have introduced reforms to the electric power sector. One important element of these reforms is the introduction of an unbundling process, i.e., the separation of the competitive activities of supply and production from the monopole activity of transmission and distribution of electricity. There are several forms...

In this paper we investigate the household demand for childcare during lunchtime at school using a stated preferences approach. Data are collected through phone-structured interviews to 905 residents with children in the German-speaking region of Switzerland during 2007. Poisson models with random and fixed effects are used to explore factors affec...

The benefits of separating drug prescribing and dispensing are still unclear, in particular when drug consumption is characterized by important spillovers. We investigate the role of dispensing physicians in the consumption of antibiotics characterized by two opposite external effects: infection prevention and control, and bacterial resistance. We...

In this paper we estimate the long- and short-run price elasticities of residential electricity consumption in Switzerland from a household survey by constructing an index of the stock of household appliances as well as by using energy services. We create the index by aggregating the information on the major household appliances. The index is used...

The promotion of energy efficiency is seen as one of the top priorities of EU energy policy (EC, 2010). In order to design and implement effective energy policy instruments, it is necessary to have information on energy demand price and income elasticities in addition to sound indicators of energy efficiency. This research combines the approaches t...