Structural Shocks on Renewable Energy Consumption and Investment Regimes

This paper provides useful insights into how macroeconomic and oil price shocks affect renewable energy consumption and investment in China. It includes inflation, business cycle, monetary policy, and oil price shocks. A novel methodology is employed based on a two-step approach, where a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is used to extract structural shocks in the first step and then the Markov-Switching model is used to examine the heterogeneous effects of structural shocks on renewable energy consumption and stock returns in different regimes. Our results show that inflation, monetary policy, and oil price shocks play an important role in renewable energy consumption and investment in the low-growth regime and the low-volatility regime. These results are robust to different specifications, which yield useful implications for the policymakers.