Distributional effects of energy costs: Does firm ownership structure matter?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the effect of ownership structure on the distribution of household electricity costs and its implications for income inequality. We leverage detailed data on household electricity expenditure, income, and utility tariff structures to provide new insights into the merits of alternative ownership regimes in the U.S. electricity sector. We use ownership discontinuities between adjacent statistical areas to establish causal effects. We find strong evidence that electricity costs are more regressive under cooperative and public ownership, yielding undesirable distributional outcomes. Moreover, households within cooperative and publicly-owned utility jurisdictions devote a larger portion of their income to electricity compared to consumers within private firm jurisdictions. Our findings highlight that the ownership structure in the utility sector not only affects income distribution through electricity costs within a geographic area but also has implications for spatial income inequality, offering new insights into the role of supply-side factors. This study also presents suggestive evidence that high fixed fees and the extent to which firms segment economically diverse consumer groups differently are potential mechanisms driving the observed regressivity of electricity costs. • Ownership structure in the utility sector shapes the distributional effects of electricity costs. • Electricity costs are more regressive under cooperative and public ownership. • High fixed fees and limited segmentation of consumer groups may drive cost regressivity.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it