A Panel Data Analysis of Electric Consumptions in the Residential Sector

The present work analyses a dataset on electricity consumption in an Italian region for a period of 11 years, using aggregated data on municipalities. Our aim is to estimate the value of the price elasticity, of the income elasticity and cross-price elasticity of other fuels and to analyse the influence of socio-economic, demographic, structural and climate variables on consumption levels and trends. The FEVD procedure, recently proposed by Plumper and Troeger (2007), is adopted to estimate panel data characterised by the presence of time invariant variables, or variables which vary rarely in time.