Socioeconomic Determinants of Awareness of Energy Labels and Their Influence on Purchase Decisions in the EU

This repository contains the R script and data used for the analysis presented in the paper titled “Socioeconomic Determinants of Awareness of Energy Labels and Their Influence on Purchase Decisions in the European Union”. The code reproduces all analyses, figures, and tables discussed in the manuscript.

The file energy_labels_analysis.R serves as the main script, containing code for data processing, analysis, and visualization. The script is self-contained and requires the necessary packages to be installed.

This study use a Eurobarometer survey of 27,438 individuals across 28 EU Member States commissioned by the European Commission in 2019 to analyze respondents’ awareness of the EU Energy Labeling scheme and the impact of labels on the purchases of electrical appliances (ZA7575_v1-0-0.dta).

In addittion, we use the file nuts_level1.xlsx to standardize NUTS level 1 regions across all countries, as the survey measured countries at varying NUTS levels.

To explain country-specific differences in label awareness and influence, we incorporate additional data from Eurostat, the OECD and the Manifesto Research on Political Representation project (MARPOR).

energy_price_by_country_2019s1.xlsx
gdp_pc.xlsx
imports_dependency2018-19.xlsx
pisa 2018.xlsx
MARPOR.xlsx
MPDataset_MPDS2023a.csv

The analysis reveals that individual characteristics have a stronger effect on the influence of the label on purchase decisions than on label awareness. Despite controlling for individual variables, substantial heterogeneity across countries remains. Through simulation exercises examining both universal and targeted awareness interventions, we demonstrate that even when label awareness is at its highest level, it does not necessarily translate into substantially higher influence of label on purchase decisions.