Withdrawal

Abstract

Withdrawal: Does Higher Energy Efficiency Lower Economy‐Wide Energy Use? Sebastian Rausch and Hagen Schwerin. The above article from the International Economic Review, published online on 20 January 2019 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) as an Accepted Article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/iere.12388), has been withdrawn by agreement between the journal's Co‐Editor Masaki Aoyagi, and Wiley Periodicals, LLC. The withdrawal has been agreed following a recommendation by the authors’ institution, ETH Zurich, due to an unresolved authorship dispute.

How Large is the Economy-Wide Rebound Effect?

“…There are only a few truly econometric studies of the economy-wide rebound using stochastic frontier models or VARs to derive energy efficiency changes. Bruns et al (2019) estimate that the rebound is around 100% in the US economy, which is similar to that estimated by Rausch and Schwerin (2018) whose calibration of a general equilibrium model is probably the most credible to date. It is easy, however, to question whether both these papers have actually identified an energy efficiency improvement.…”

“…Lemoine finds that high rebound and even backfire are likely because the efficiency improvement in this sector reduces the price of energy. Rausch and Schwerin (2018) build a single sector general equilibrium growth model using the putty-clay model, where once a capital vintage is chosen, no substitutability between energy and capital is possible. In the long run, however, energy and capital have a Cobb-Douglas relationship.…”

“…Most econometric methods used to date are partial equilibrium approaches that do not include all mechanisms that might increase or reduce the rebound and mostly they do not credibly identify the rebound effect. However, there are a couple of recent empirically estimated or validated general equilibrium approaches (Rausch and Schwerin, 2018;Bruns et al, 2019), which find that the economy-wide rebound is around 100%. These findings are also supported by more anecdotal economic history.…”

Estimating the economy-wide rebound effect using empirically identified structural vector autoregressions

“…The method depends on having good estimates of the production parameters -a notoriously difficult problem (León-Ledesma et al, 2010) -assumes a very simple structure to the economy, and because the energy price is held constant is a partial equilibrium approach. 1 In between these two extremes, Rausch and Schwerin (2018) build a small general equilibrium macro-economic model that is calibrated on U.S. annual data from 1960 to 2011. Their model is a so-called putty-clay model, where once a capital vintage is chosen, no substitutability between energy and capital is possible.…”

General equilibrium rebound from energy efficiency innovation

“…Neoclassical growth settings have emphasized how analogues of partial equilibrium income and substitution effects arise after improving the productivity of energy in the broader economy's production function (Saunders, 1992(Saunders, , 2000. Finally, Hart (2018) and Rausch and Schwerin (2019) study the role of rebound in explaining the long-run dynamics of aggregate energy use, emphasizing expanding varieties of energy-using goods and putty-clay production of energy-using capital, respectively.…”