The 10% carbon challenge: Nudge and energy savings

Can children effectively nudge their parents to change their energy consumption behavior? This study sets up a quasi-experiment using the “Project Carbon Zero” campaign, an energy-saving contest in Singapore, to empirically test the effectiveness of school children nudges in bringing electricity conservation messages home and influencing behaviors of their families and neighbors. Based on the 2 kilometers (km) home-school distance as an identification, our results show that families living within 2 km from participating schools (treatment group) used 1.8% less electricity at the block level than other families outside the 2 km school zone (control group) during the contest period. The electricity savings effects are persistent with an estimated marginal savings 1.6% in the post-campaign months. The results imply that policy makers and advocates for energy conservation could use school children nudges in public campaigns, instead of pecuniary interventions, to drive home behavioral changes in electricity conservation of families.

Agarwal, Sumit and Rengarajan, Satyanarain and Sing, Tien Foo and Yang, Yang, Nudges of School Children and Electricity Conservation: Evidence from the 'Project Carbon Zero' Campaign in Singapore (September 29, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2529183 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2529183