Intergenerational Coresidence and Electricity Consumption: Age Effect, Retirement Effect and Scale Economies Effect

Many studies have found that, even in the most modernized urban areas in China, intergenerational coresidence still account for a large proportion. Intergenerational coresidence, low retirement age, high female labor participation rate can make the household activity and the related energy consumption patterns different from western countries. In this paper, we analysis the impact of intergeneration coresidence on energy consumption. Taking electricity as an example, we find that there are significant differences between interrogational coresidence household and single generation household. electricity usage of single generation household is much higher than other intergenerational coresidence household. Also, the variance in single generation is much larger than others. We pooled data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and used OLS regression model to decompose "Age effect", "Retirement effect" and "Scale economies effect". The decomposition model shows that (1) the presence of "Scale economies effect", which means that the household per person electricity usage declines not only when household members increase, but also when intergenerational household members live together; (2) "age effect" and "retirement effect" can be found that female over 50 years old live in a household can increase household per person electricity consumption, and all the other age-gender-specific group live in a household can reduce household per person electricity consumption, especially for male at the age of 30-40; male consume less electricity in household than female at all age group, except for age 10-20. Energy policy makers can benefit from better understanding of these effects.