Persistence in Sectoral Energy Use in the United States and its Implication for Environmental Policy

Energy use is the primary source of greenhouse gas and carbon emissions; so, reduction of energy use in any sector of the economy can be used as a tool to fight against global warming. However, to do that satisfactorily, it is necessary to know the persistence property of sectoral energy use. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the persistence property of sectoral energy use in the United States during 1970-2009 using different bootstrap and subsampling confidence intervals. These confidence intervals provide more information compared to the unit root tests. Not only they provide evidence about the stationarity or non-stationarity of the variables, but also they show the degree of persistence. In addition, they require fewer assumptions on the nature of data. The findings show that the energy use in the commercial and industrial sectors appear to be stationary. However, the energy use in the residential and transportation sectors are non-stationary. Therefore, the residential and transportation sectors are the best candidates to implement energy conservation and economic or environmental oriented policies, because the effect of these policies would last.

کلیدواژه ها:

Energy use ، Confidence interval ، Stationary ، Persistence ، Bootstrap ، subsampling. JEL classification: C22 ، Q40