Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Aging: Disentangling Behavior from Energy Efficiency

International audienceDemographic aging affects Western societies and calls for the adaptation of a number of economic structures. But this trend requires us to take also into account the behavioral changes inherent in aging if we are develop sustainably, specifically concerning resource consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in the context of global warming. The aim of this research is to assess the impact of age on emissions by disentangling the pure effect of behavioral patterns and the effect of home energy efficiency. Showing that a selection bias arises through the choice of home, we isolate the pure effect of the behavior of older people. We use a discrete-continuous model to address potential endogeneity in a residential energy consumption model due to the choice of home energy characteristics. As a key contribution, we provide evidence that age does have a significant but indirect positive impact on carbon dioxide emissions, through the choice of dwelling