Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
困于过去：老旧住房与电采暖的采用
Locked in the past: Old housing and the adoption of electric heating
摘要
Can history explain some of the variation in electric heating usage across American homes today? Assembling a new county panel, we find that areas with more dwellings built before WWII are slower at adopting electric heating in later decades. This is due to old buildings being retrofitted more slowly and new buildings being less likely to have electric heating. We propose two ways to distinguish between persistence and path dependence as mechanisms, and show that our results largely reflect the latter. We document how various factors like natural disasters and government intervention can weaken the hold of history.
中文摘要
历史能否解释当今美国家庭电采暖使用差异的部分原因？通过构建新的县级面板数据，我们发现二战前建造的住宅较多的地区，在后续几十年中采用电采暖的速度较慢。这归因于老旧建筑改造进程缓慢，以及新建建筑采用电采暖的可能性较低。我们提出两种方法来区分持续性与路径依赖作为机制，并表明我们的结果在很大程度上反映了后者。我们记录了自然灾害和政府干预等多种因素如何削弱历史的影响。