Seminar Kleinman Center Event

Energy Economics and Finance Seminar

Monday, November 1, 2021 | 4:00PM - 5:00PM
NEW DATE

Speaker

Samuel Stolper
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Location

Huntsman Hall – Room JMHH G90
3730 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Event Summary

The seminar series in Energy Economics & Finance (EEF) is jointly organized by Wharton’s Business Economics and Public Policy Department, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and Wharton’s Business, Climate and Environment Lab. The scope of the seminar includes regulation and policy papers. The scope of the seminar also includes environmental and transportation issues, as long as there is a connection with energy. Sessions are biweekly on Mondays from 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

For Fall 2021, the seminar will be a combination of in-person and virtual talks. In-person talks will be held at JMHH G90 while virtual ones will meet via Zoom. Meeting links and passcodes for virtual talks are required in order to join and will be included in the emailed meeting announcement prior to each session.

Find and add a Google Calendar version of the schedule on the BEPP seminar page.

To sign up for the seminar, please send your name, email, and affiliation to Dhivya Kaushik: dhivya@wharton.upenn.edu

TALK TITLE: Using Machine Learning to Target Treatment: The Case of Household Energy Use

Abstract: We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges towards household energy conservation. The average response is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full distribution of responses ranges from -30 to +10 kWh. Selective targeting of treatment using the forest raises social net benefits by 12-120 percent, depending on the year and welfare function. Pre-treatment consumption and home value are the strongest predictors of treatment effect. We find suggestive evidence of a “boomerang effect”: households with lower consumption than similar neighbors are the ones with positive TE estimates.

speaker

Samuel Stolper

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Sam Stolper is an assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He earned a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard in 2016.
Fall 2021 Seminar Schedule
  • 9/27: Ishan Nath, Princeton University
  • 10/11: Tihitina Andarge, UMass-Amherst
  • 10/18: Lucas Davis, UC-Berkeley
  • 10/25: Francisco Costa, University of Delaware
  • NEW DATE 11/1: Sam Stolper, University of Michigan
  • 11/8: Paige Weber, UNC-Chapel Hill