Home-work commuting distances are increasing in Europe. Many studies see this as due to geographical mismatches between workplaces and homes, or worker skills and job locations, and often recommend policies to close geographical gaps between jobs and suitable workers. A different approach sees...

Policymakers are increasingly concerned about rebound effects, which lead to lower savings than expected when energy-efficiency increases. There are difficulties in making coherent comparisons between magnitudes of rebound effects in different sectors, such as home heating, industry and...

Currently there is a strong policy commitment in European Union (EU) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to increase the energy efficiency of residential buildings, and it is widely assumed that this will naturally and automatically reduce domestic energy...

Policy on domestic thermal retrofits is usually designed as a top-down enterprise, setting standards and inducing homeowners to retrofit accordingly. Its underlying assumption is that correct retrofit technology is developed by experts and comes down through supply chains to households, who...

Germany aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels and has merged this target with mandatory Energy Saving Regulations for thermal renovation of existing homes: the policy uses the criterion of ‘economic viability’, whereby renovations must pay back through the space...