Does Energy Consumption Respond to Price Shocks? Evidence from a Regression-Discontinuity Design

Confronting an energy crisis, the government of Ghana enacted a power factor correction policy in 1995. The policy imposes a penalty on large-scale electricity users, namely, special load tariff (SLT) customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), whose power factor is below 90%. This paper investigates the impact of this policy on these firms’ power factor improvement by using panel data from 183 SLT customers from 1994 to 1997 and from 2012. To avoid potential endogeneity, this paper adopts a regression discontinuity design (RDD) with the power factor of the firms in the previous year as a running variable, with its cutoff set at the penalty threshold. The result shows that these large-scale electricity users who face the penalty because their power factor falls just short of the threshold are more likely to improve their power factor in the subsequent year, implying that the power factor correction policy implemented by Ghana’s government is effective.

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How Much of the Incumbency Advantage is Due to Scare-Off?

Political Science Research and Methods ◽

10.1017/psrm.2014.43 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 493-514 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Andrew B. Hall ◽

James M. Snyder

Keyword(s):

Regression Discontinuity ◽

Regression Discontinuity Design ◽

Incumbency Advantage ◽

Previous Election ◽

Us Senate ◽

State Legislative

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the degree to which incumbents scare off challengers with previous officeholder experience. The estimates indicate a surprisingly small amount of scare-off, at least in cases where the previous election was nearly tied. As Lee and others have shown (and as we confirm for our samples) the estimated party incumbency advantage in these same cases is quite large—in fact, it is about as large as the average incumbency advantage for all races found using other approaches. Drawing from previous estimates of the electoral value of officeholder experience, we thus calculate that scare-off in these cases accounts for only about 5–7 percent of the party incumbency advantage. We show that these patterns are similar in elections for US House seats, statewide offices and US senate seats, and state legislative seats.

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Combining the regression discontinuity design and propensity score-based weighting to improve causal inference in program evaluation

Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice ◽

10.1111/j.1365-2753.2011.01768.x ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 317-325 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Ariel Linden ◽

John L. Adams

Keyword(s):

Program Evaluation ◽

Propensity Score ◽

Causal Inference ◽

Regression Discontinuity ◽

Regression Discontinuity Design

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