Understanding energy consumption in Mexico: an age-period-cohort analysis

Household energy consumption has increased in Mexican urban areas over the last 20 years. Explanations point, on the one hand, to changes on household wealth and, on the other hand, to life style transformations towards more energy intense everyday practices. We argue that disentangle these effects requires a cohort-period analysis since it is necessary to separate increments on income at older ages from those increases related to country wealth (period) and generational differences in consumption patterns. To examine these effects, we pooled multiple years of the Income and Expenditure Household Surveys (1992-2008), and we build synthetic cohorts to implement a hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis (HAPC) of household energy consumption in urban Mexico. After documenting the presence of cohort differences in energy consumption (Sanchez y Jasso 2012), this paper examines a) if changes Mexico´s economic wealth impacts household energy consumption, and b) whether such adjustment differs across cohorts.