Event Information
The next EEU seminar will be held on Monday the 14th of April at 12:10 – 13:15 in B44.
The seminar will be held by Valentin Laprie and he will be presenting a paper on the topic of: Moral hazard in the quality of building energy efficiency. Laprie is an environmental economist specializing in energy efficiency and climate policy. He is associated with the Chaire Économie du Climat, where his work contributes to understanding the challenges in verifying and ensuring the quality of energy efficiency improvements.
When: Monday, April 14th at 12:10-13:00.
Where: B44 or via Zoom.
Speaker: Valentin Laprie
Title: Moral hazard in the quality of building energy efficiency: Evidence from post-retrofit audits
Abstract: Quality defects in building energy efficiency are a little-studied explanation for the energy performance gap. They are generally attributed to moral hazard -- the difficulty to verify quality creating an incentive for the contractor to under-perform. The evidence so far is only indirect, however, as it focuses on the relationship between the easiness with which contractor's tasks can be checked and energy savings. We fill this gap and provide direct evidence of the relationship between the easiness of verification and the prevalence of defects. We use a French database of 1,460 post-retrofit audits that contain information on both defects and non-defects. We find that both the occurrence of defects and their severity increase when they can be classified as hard, as opposed to easy, to verify. The effects are more pronounced when it comes to energy efficiency works, thereby confirming the importance of moral hazard for the energy efficiency gap. Our results are robust to a range of placebo tests. They call for placing more emphasis on the monitoring and verification of building energy efficiency works.
Hope to see you there!