TY - JOUR AU - Bruegge, Christopher D AU - Deryugina, Tatyana AU - Myers, Erica TI - The Distributional Effects of Building Energy Codes JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 24211 PY - 2018 Y2 - January 2018 DO - 10.3386/w24211 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w24211 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w24211.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Christopher D. Bruegge 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305-6072 E-Mail: cbruegge@stanford.edu Tatyana Deryugina Department of Finance University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 515 East Gregory Drive, MC-520 Champaign, IL 61820 Tel: 925/349-8999 E-Mail: deryugin@illinois.edu Erica Myers University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign E-Mail: ecmyers@illinois.edu M1 - published as Chris Bruegge, Tatyana Deryugina, Erica Myers. "The Distributional Effects of Building Energy Codes," in Tatyana Deryugina, Don Fullerton, and Billy Pizer, organizers, "Energy Policy Tradeoffs between Economic Efficiency and Distributional Equity" Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, volume 6, number S1 (University of Chicago Press) (2019) AB - State-level building energy codes have been around for over 40 years, but recent empirical research has cast doubt on their effectiveness. A potential virtue of standards-based policies is that they may be less regressive than explicit taxes on energy consumption. However, this conjecture has not been tested empirically in the case of building energy codes. Using spatial variation in California’s code strictness created by building climate zones, combined with information on over 350,000 homes located within 3 kilometers of climate zone borders, we evaluate the effect of building energy codes on home characteristics, energy use, and home value. We also study building energy codes’ distributional burdens. Our key findings are that stricter codes create a non-trivial reduction in homes’ square footage and the number of bedrooms at the lower end of the income distribution. On a per-dwelling basis, we observe energy use reductions only in the second lowest income quintile, and energy use per square foot actually increases in the bottom quintile. Home values of lower-income households fall, while those of high-income households rise. We interpret these results as evidence that building energy codes result in more distortions for lower-income households and that decreases in square footage are responsible for much of the code-induced energy savings. ER -