Increasing Block Tariff Electricity Pricing and Propensity to Purchase Dirty Fuels: Empirical Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We combine panel household data with the introduction of an increasing block tariffs (IBT) for residential electricity in three experimental regions of Russia to analyze the relationship between the IBT and the propensity of households to purchase dirty fuels. Using a difference-in-differences empirical specification, we find that the propensity to purchase dirty fuels has increased in the regions where the IBT schemes were introduced. The size of the increase varies from 3.8 percentage points for the full sample of households to 13.4 percentage points when restricting the sample to households that do not have access to district heating networks.