James Sears , an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, will give the talk, "How Much More Price-Fluid are Utility Customers in the Long-Run? An Application to Urban Water Demand," at noon on Wednesday, March 4, in 157 Hosler Building at Penn State University Park. The event is part of a spring seminar series hosted by the Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI). The talk is free and open to the public.
Understanding how households will react to utility price changes is an important factor in how public utilities set rates, particularly for managing demand during scarcity or drought conditions, according to Sears. This knowledge is especially valuable for water districts, as they must modify prices to meet short-run scarcity and to shift households to lower long-run consumption paths.
"Understanding consumer price-responsiveness in both the short- and long-run is of critical importance for utilities tasked with combating temporary scarcity and balancing long-term infrastructure investment and demand needs," Sears said. "Despite their importance, utility price elasticities are often difficult to credibly identify due to a wide range of empirical challenges."
In his talk, Sears will discuss his research investigating spatially induced price differences within a single water utility district to separately identify responses to short- and long-run price changes for the same set of households.
Sears is an applied microeconomist who focuses on topics in environmental and consumer behavioral economics, with an emphasis on urban water, nutritional assistance and health and decision-making by economic agents. Much of his work seeks to measure how consumers respond to shocks - whether environmental, informational, social or public policy-driven - and use these insights to inform the design of more efficient, more equitable and better-targeted policies. He frequently combines administrative and spatial data with forefront econometric techniques for identifying causal treatment effects and exploring heterogeneous responses. Sears received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and his master of science from Montana State University.
About EEEPI
Established in 2011, EEEPI operates as a University-wide initiative at Penn State with support from the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and the Institute of Energy and the Environment. EEEPI seeks to catalyze research in energy and environmental systems economics across the University and to build a world-class group of economists with interests in interdisciplinary collaboration.
