Empirical investigation of natural gas consumption and price elasticity: evidence from billing and distribution data in Italy

The thesis is formed of three essays linked by a common topic regarding the analysis of natural gas consumption at the local level in Italy. The first chapter is an empirical investigation analyzing the monthly billing data of 51,177 end-users in Veneto (Italy) in the period 2016-2018. Several panel-data models are developed to study determinants of individual natural gas consumption and, especially, price elasticity. The second chapter investigates changes in natural gas consumption patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We employed the Gini index in the study of intra-day energy seasonality, analyzing an original data-set of hourly natural gas demand in northern Italy. The third chapter considers spatial heterogeneity as a new source of information in energy consumption data at the micro level. The analysis integrates a billing data-set of 8,924 natural gas consumers with spatial coordinates. Then, we applied a two-stage technique to study price elasticity and consumption determinants, solving the endogeneity problem through the spatial information of end-users.