Commercial Spending

Hi Alex. After reading your post, we are not clear on what you mean by “Is there anything more true to commercial owner spending patterns than household income change?” But if what you asking is whether to model the cost-savings to the businesses who participated in the energy efficiency program as a Household Income Change, we probably say use some other Activity Change like a Labor Income Change and model it as a change in Proprietor Income. With this type of change, all of the direct effect is basically leaked from the model. In reality, however, we would suggest not attempting to model the impact of these cost savings. The reason is that we don’t know how the businesses will use the $21,744. They may save it, they might pass it along to their employees in terms of bonuses, or they may invest the funds back into their businesses. We simply don’t know. What you could do report how the program is savings businesses on their lighting expenses, which is an impact of the program. Having said that, we suspect that these cost-savings did not occur without some investment of resources like retrofitting and installation of new lighting fixtures in these businesses, actual purchases of these new lighting systems, and other expenses. If this is the case, then you may want to model the impact of those expenditures associated with the energy efficient program. We hope this answers your question.