Building energy efficiency and public policies – BEEPP

The energy renovation of buildings is essential to achieve carbon neutrality in France by 2050. To accelerate this renovation, the French government has implemented various schemes. But these do not have the expected effects. The decision-making process regarding the energy renovation of owners' homes is complex and is not based solely on a cost-benefit analysis on the part of owners. One of the objectives of the BEEPP project is to understand this process. The BEEPP will contribute to the literature on ex ante theoretical models of investment decisions in the energy renovation of housing through behavioural and experimental economics. This approach will require the determination of a utility function and the estimation of its parameters specific to the household. These parameters include energy levels and other assets enabling a decent life. Knowledge of these levels is essential to carry out policies whose objective is on the one hand to encourage households to reduce their energy consumption and on the other hand to get households out of fuel poverty.

The BEEPP will not only focus on the renovation decision of owner-occupiers of individual houses. Indeed, in the analysis, condominiums will also be considered.
Public policies encouraging the energy renovation of buildings do not only concern housing, we will also study the impact of the obligation to display a EPC score on the property value of office buildings. The evaluation of the green value of office real estate is important because it is of interest on the one hand to investors concerned about return on investment and on the other hand to public authorities seeking to know the impact of regulations on these different types of buildings.

To carry out this project we will use different tools/methodologies/modeling. Thus, we will rely on statistical and econometric techniques. We will also develop different economic models: 1. investment decisions in uncertain environments; 2. multi-agents for collective decisions.