IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/opques/qef_776_23.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The effects of the 2021 energy crisis on medium-sized and large industrial firms: evidence from Italy

Author

Listed:
  • Matteo Alpino

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Luca Citino

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Annalisa Frigo

    (Bank of Italy)

Abstract

Using survey data from Italy, we study the effects of the 2021 energy crisis on the energy input choices of medium and large-sized industrial firms. Our instrumental variable (IV) strategy, based on the availability of fixed-price contracts subscribed before the crisis, reveals an average infra-annual price elasticity of demand very close to zero for both electricity and natural gas. Large energy consumers subject to the European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) have significantly larger natural gas elasticities and were able to partially substitute gas with other fossil fuels. Surprisingly however, their elasticity to electricity prices is similar to that of other firms. We finally show that in 2021 energy-intensive and EU ETS firms increased their final prices more than other firms, but this differential effect was mitigated by the presence of fixed-price contracts. Our evidence is valid for 2021 but does not necessarily extend to 2022.

Suggested Citation

  • Matteo Alpino & Luca Citino & Annalisa Frigo, 2023. "The effects of the 2021 energy crisis on medium-sized and large industrial firms: evidence from Italy," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 776, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_776_23
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2023-0776/QEF_776_23.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stefanie Stantcheva, 2022. "How to Run Surveys: A Guide to Creating Your Own Identifying Variation and Revealing the Invisible," NBER Working Papers 30527, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Robert W. Hahn & Robert D. Metcalfe, 2021. "Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Energy Subsidies," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(5), pages 1658-1688, May.
    3. Bardazzi, Rossella & Oropallo, Filippo & Pazienza, Maria Grazia, 2015. "Do manufacturing firms react to energy prices? Evidence from Italy," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 168-181.
    4. Graf, Christoph & Wozabal, David, 2013. "Measuring competitiveness of the EPEX spot market for electricity," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 948-958.
    5. Csereklyei, Zsuzsanna, 2020. "Price and income elasticities of residential and industrial electricity demand in the European Union," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    6. Lucas W. Davis & Erich Muehlegger, 2010. "Do Americans consume too little natural gas? An empirical test of marginal cost pricing," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 41(4), pages 791-810, December.
    7. Andrea Pozzi & Fabiano Schivardi, 2016. "Demand or productivity: what determines firm growth?," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 47(3), pages 608-630, August.
    8. Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, 2009. "Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 8769.
    9. Rodano, Giacomo & Serrano-Velarde, Nicolas & Tarantino, Emanuele, 2016. "Bankruptcy law and bank financing," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(2), pages 363-382.
    10. Imbens, Guido W & Angrist, Joshua D, 1994. "Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 62(2), pages 467-475, March.
    11. Burke, Paul J. & Yang, Hewen, 2016. "The price and income elasticities of natural gas demand: International evidence," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 466-474.
    12. Paul J. Burke & Ashani Abayasekara, 2018. "The Price Elasticity of Electricity Demand in the United States: A Three-Dimensional Analysis," The Energy Journal, , vol. 39(2), pages 123-146, March.
    13. Katrina Jessoe & David Rapson, 2014. "Knowledge Is (Less) Power: Experimental Evidence from Residential Energy Use," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(4), pages 1417-1438, April.
    14. David S. Lee, 2009. "Training, Wages, and Sample Selection: Estimating Sharp Bounds on Treatment Effects," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(3), pages 1071-1102.
    15. José Luis Montiel Olea & Carolin Pflueger, 2013. "A Robust Test for Weak Instruments," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(3), pages 358-369, July.
    16. Luigi Guiso & Giuseppe Parigi, 1999. "Investment and Demand Uncertainty," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 185-227.
    17. Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2002. "Inverse probability weighted M-estimators for sample selection, attrition, and stratification," Portuguese Economic Journal, Springer;Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestao, vol. 1(2), pages 117-139, August.
    18. Catherine Hausman & Ryan Kellogg, 2015. "Welfare and Distributional Implications of Shale Gas," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 46(1 (Spring), pages 71-139.
    19. Maximilian Auffhammer & Edward Rubin, 2018. "Natural Gas Price Elasticities and Optimal Cost Recovery Under Consumer Heterogeneity: Evidence from 300 million natural gas bills," NBER Working Papers 24295, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Joshua D. Angrist & Kathryn Graddy & Guido W. Imbens, 2000. "The Interpretation of Instrumental Variables Estimators in Simultaneous Equations Models with an Application to the Demand for Fish," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 67(3), pages 499-527.
    21. Mary Amiti & Oleg Itskhoki & Jozef Konings, 2019. "International Shocks, Variable Markups, and Domestic Prices," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(6), pages 2356-2402.
    22. Isaiah Andrews & James H. Stock & Liyang Sun, 2019. "Weak Instruments in Instrumental Variables Regression: Theory and Practice," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 11(1), pages 727-753, August.
    23. Steve Bond & Gicoamo Rodano & Nicolas Serrano-Velarde, 2015. "Investment Dynamics in Italy: Financing Constraints, Demand and Uncertainty," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 283, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    24. Glynn, Adam N. & Quinn, Kevin M., 2010. "An Introduction to the Augmented Inverse Propensity Weighted Estimator," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 18(1), pages 36-56, January.
    25. Peter C. Reiss & Matthew W. White, 2005. "Household Electricity Demand, Revisited," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 72(3), pages 853-883.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fetzer, Thiemo & Palmou, Christina & Schneebacher, Jakob, 2024. "How do firms cope with economic shocks in real time?," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1517, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    2. Francesco Corsello & Marco Flaccadoro & Stefania Villa, 2023. "Quantity versus price dynamics: the role of energy and bottlenecks in the Italian industrial sector," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 781, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    3. Marco Fruzzetti & Tiziano Ropele, 2024. "Nowcasting Italian industrial production: the predictive role of lubricant oils," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 866, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Robert W. Hahn & Robert D. Metcalfe, 2021. "Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Energy Subsidies," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(5), pages 1658-1688, May.
    2. Kostakis, Ioannis & Lolos, Sarantis & Sardianou, Eleni, 2021. "Residential natural gas demand: Assessing the evidence from Greece using pseudo-panels, 2012–2019," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    3. Li, Raymond & Woo, Chi-Keung & Tishler, Asher & Zarnikau, Jay, 2022. "Price responsiveness of commercial demand for natural gas in the US," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 256(C).
    4. Li, Raymond & Woo, Chi-Keung & Tishler, Asher & Zarnikau, Jay, 2022. "How price responsive is industrial demand for natural gas in the United States?," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    5. Mogstad, Magne & Torgovitsky, Alexander, 2024. "Instrumental variables with unobserved heterogeneity in treatment effects," Handbook of Labor Economics,, Elsevier.
    6. Do,Quy-Toan & Jacoby,Hanan G., 2020. "Sophisticated Policy with Naive Agents : Habit Formation and Piped Water in Vietnam," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9207, The World Bank.
    7. Pallante, Gianluca & Russo, Emanuele & Roventini, Andrea, 2023. "Does public R&D funding crowd-in private R&D investment? Evidence from military R&D expenditures for US states," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(8).
    8. Michelle Yin & Garima Siwach & Dajun Lin, 2023. "Vocational Rehabilitation Services and Labor Market Outcomes for Transition‐Age Youth with Disabilities in Maine," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(1), pages 166-197, January.
    9. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2018. "A General Weighted Average Representation of the Ordinary and Two-Stage Least Squares Estimands," IZA Discussion Papers 11866, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Peter Hull & Michal Kolesár & Christopher Walters, 2022. "Labor by design: contributions of David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 124(3), pages 603-645, July.
    11. Guido W. Imbens & Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2009. "Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(1), pages 5-86, March.
    12. Prest, Brian C. & Stock, James H., 2023. "Climate royalty surcharges," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    13. Imbens, Guido W., 2014. "Instrumental Variables: An Econometrician's Perspective," IZA Discussion Papers 8048, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Zhang, Hongliang, 2016. "Identification of treatment effects under imperfect matching with an application to Chinese elite schools," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 56-82.
    15. Wang, Wenjie & Zhang, Yichong, 2024. "Wild bootstrap inference for instrumental variables regressions with weak and few clusters," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 241(1).
    16. Tymon S{l}oczy'nski, 2018. "Interpreting OLS Estimands When Treatment Effects Are Heterogeneous: Smaller Groups Get Larger Weights," Papers 1810.01576, arXiv.org, revised May 2020.
    17. Vira Semenova, 2020. "Generalized Lee Bounds," Papers 2008.12720, arXiv.org, revised May 2025.
    18. Joshua D. Angrist, 2022. "Empirical Strategies in Economics: Illuminating the Path From Cause to Effect," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(6), pages 2509-2539, November.
    19. Semih Tumen & Belgi Turan, 2023. "The effect of fertility on female labor supply in a labor market with extensive informality," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 65(4), pages 1855-1894, October.
    20. Angel, Marco Del & Richardson, Gary, 2024. "Independent regulators and financial stability evidence from gubernatorial election campaigns in the Progressive Era," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    energy crisis; price-elasticity of energy demand;

    JEL classification:

    • Q41 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Demand and Supply; Prices

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_776_23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.