Household response to multiple environmental policy instruments

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Household consumption and production activities contribute to a significant share of climate gas emissions, and are hence an important target in climate policy. A range of policy instruments are implemented to move household energy consumption from electr icity and fossil fuels for space heating to renewable energy, and increase energy efficiency. The effectiveness of these instruments depends on the households' responses. To assure the efficiency of current and future efforts in achieving the aims, analys es of how a combination of instruments has changed household behavior are of great importance. This project aims to increase our understanding of households' response to different types of policy instruments when facing more than one instrument. We focu s on specific cases of instrument use. In the first analysis, we want to analyze how the use of policy instruments to reduce household energy consumption may result in increased consumption of goods and services from other sectors, resulting in a "leakage "-effect across sectors in energy consumption, and thus emissions of greenhouse gases. In the next analysis, we look at how the use of soft policy tools, like information campaigns and energy labeling, may affect the households response to harder policy t ools, such as taxes and direct regulations. We aim to extend the current literature by modeling the behavioral mechanisms behind changes in attitudes, norms and awareness resulting from soft policy instruments and their effect on price and income response . In last part of the project, we analyze the adverse effects the use of policy tools to achieve one environmental goal may have on the achievement of other environmental goals in cases of direct policy conflicts. This part of the project aims to better u nderstand the trade-offs embedded in different environmental policy aims, in order to balance them against each other to achieve a holistic and comprehensive use of policy measures.