지역난방 기반 주택용 열에 대한 수요함수의 추정

Residential heat is an indispensable good used for heating, cooking, and bathing in the house.
This paper attempts to estimate the demand function for residential heat through district heating system.
To this end, quarterly panel data for 18 branches of Korea District Heating Cooperation during the period 2006-2013 is used. As the demand function for residential heat provides information on the behaviors of consumers’ residential heat consumption, it can be usefully utilized in forecasting the effects of policy variables such as residential heat price and consumer’s income. We apply both random effect model (REM) and fixed effect model (FEM) to analyzing the panel data. Moreover, we conduct the Hausman specification test to check for the null hypothesis the REM is more suitable than the FEM. Since the null hypothesis can be rejected at the 1% level, the results from the FEM is more appropriate to deal with unobserved individual heterogeneity. We found that the price and income elasticities are –0.89 and 0.32, respectively, and statistically significant at the 1% level. This portraies that residential heat is price- and income-inelastic. The residential heat is an essential goods in daily life, and thus the residential heat demand would not be immediately adjusted to changes in price and/or income.