This paper develops a pseudo-panel approach to examine household electricity demand behavior through the household life cycle and its response to income variations to help strengthen the energy policy-making process. Our empirical methodology is based on three rich independent microdata surveys (the National Housing Surveys), which are representative of the French housing sector. The resulted sample covers the 2006–2016 period. Using within estimations, this paper finds striking evidence that the income elasticity of French residential electricity demand is 0.22, averaged over our four cohorts of generations. In light of other works, our estimate stands in the lower range. The empirical results also show that residential electricity consumption follows an inverted U-shaped distribution as a function of the age of the household’s head. Most notably, it appears that households at the mid-point of their life cycle are relatively the largest consumers of electricity. This outcome has important implications for policy-making. Any public policy aimed at reducing household energy consumption should consider this differentiation in consumption according to the position of households over the life cycle, and therefore target as priority households at the highest level of consumption.

本文开发了一种伪面板方法，以研究整个家庭生命周期中的家庭电力需求行为及其对收入变化的响应，以帮助加强能源决策过程。我们的经验方法是基于三个丰富的独立微观数据调查（国家房屋调查），它们代表了法国的房屋领域。结果样本涵盖2006-2016年期间。通过使用估计数，本文发现了令人惊讶的证据，表明法国住宅用电需求的收入弹性为0.22，这是我们四代人的平均水平。根据其他工作，我们的估计范围较低。实证结果还表明，居民用电量遵循户头年龄的函数呈倒U型分布。最为显着地，看来，处于生命周期中期的家庭相对而言是最大的电力消费者。这一结果对决策具有重要意义。任何旨在减少家庭能源消耗的公共政策都应根据家庭在整个生命周期中的位置来考虑这种消费差异，因此应将其作为最高消费水平的优先家庭。