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Incentives For Information Provision: Energy Efficiency In The Spanish Rental Market, Xueying Bian, Natalia Fabra

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we build a search model with asymmetric information regarding houses' energy efficiency. The objective is to shed light on the house owners' incentives to disclose energy certificates (ECs) in the rental market. Such incentives depend not only on the rent premium for more efficient houses - as previously documented - but also on the implicit rent penalty for unlabeled houses. Interestingly, we show that such a penalty is higher the greater the disclosure rate of ECs in the local market. This suggests that the enforcement of the EC regulation should be more stringent during the early phases, …