Estimating residential demand for electricity in the United States, 1965-2006

This paper examines the residential demand for electricity in the US economy as a function of the per capita income, the price of electricity, the price of oil for heating purposes, the weather conditions and the stock of occupied housing over the period 1965-2006. This paper has two novelties: first, the occupied stock of houses as a proxy for the stock of electrical appliances and second the identification of a possible equilibrium relationship among the variables is ascertained through the recently advanced ARDL approach to cointegration. Our empirical findings give support to a stable long-run relationship implying also short-run and long-run elasticities whose size and sign are comparable to other similar studies.