An analysis of the relationship between rental housing and adoption of self-generating energy sources in Brazil using matching methodology

Abstract

We examine the effect of household tenure choice on adopting self-generation energy technologies in Brazil. We employ microdata from the Household Budget Survey (POF) dataset for 2017 and 2018 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and matching methodology to evaluate various hypotheses regarding occupancy status, credit availability, purchasing power and life cycle theory. We also use placebo treatments, propensity score weighting, entropy balancing and Rosenbaum's sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of our findings. Results show that leasing a residence negatively and significantly affects families' adoption of self-generating technologies with an estimated probability reduction of around 62%, with greater effects when considering credit, wages and life cycle.