IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp2139.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Adoption, incidence and welfare impacts of interest-free loans: evidence from solar PV

Author

Listed:
  • Leanne Cass
  • Misato Sato
  • Aurelien Saussay

Abstract

Steep declines in solar PV costs raises questions about whether, and how, to continue support. We leverage administrative microdata on the near-universe of UK domestic PV and a matched difference-in-differences design exploiting devolved UK policy to evaluate the zero-interest Home Energy Scotland loan. The loan increased household adoption even in a low solar-potential setting and shifted take-up towards smaller systems. Distributionally, gains were broad and not concentrated among high-income areas, and were relatively strong in urban and accessible rural locations, yielding a less skewed wealth distribution and geography of installations. A loan-specific marginal value of public funds shows welfare gains at modest fiscal cost via a consumption-smoothing, financing channel. Zero-interest loans can cost-effectively expand household PV while promoting equitable access.

Suggested Citation

  • Leanne Cass & Misato Sato & Aurelien Saussay, 2025. "Adoption, incidence and welfare impacts of interest-free loans: evidence from solar PV," CEP Discussion Papers dp2139, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2139
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2139.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:cep:cepdps:dp2139. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    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.