Lease or Buy? Quality dierences and asymmetric information in California solar panels

摘要

The market for rooftop solar panel systems are particularly vulnerable to informa-tion asymmetry issues of quality. In such a market, poor quality solar panel systemscould be expected to push out high quality ones. However, solar systems that are leasedcan be expected to overcome this asymmetric information problem. Using productiondata on approximately 1000 solar panel systems in California and a Bayesian hierar-chical regression model, I nd that leased systems show a signicantly higher level ofquality - in the form of degradation over time - than those bought out-right.