Communicating Program Eligibility: A Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Field Experiment

By Jeffrey Hemmeter, John Phillips, Elana Safran, and Nicholas Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We conducted a direct mail field experiment with 4,016,461 individuals to test several key hypotheses about why take-up of Supplemental Security Income among individuals age 65 and above is so low. Communicating likely eligibility in a basic letter genera...

The Role of People versus Places in Individual Carbon Emissions

By Eva Lyubich

American Economic Review, May 2025

There is substantial spatial heterogeneity in household carbon emissions. I leverage movers in two decades of administrative Decennial Census and American Community Survey data to estimate place effects—the amount by which carbon emissions change for th...

Selling Subscriptions

By Liran Einav, Ben Klopack, and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, May 2025

We study one benefit to firms of selling subscriptions: the prospect that consumers will continue to pay for subscriptions they no longer value. We use comprehensive data from a large payment card network to document that months during which cards are rep...

Energy Hogs and Energy Angels: What Does Residential Electricity Use Really Tell Us about Profligate Consumption?

By Severin Borenstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

High residential volumetric electricity prices are partially justified as placing more of the cost burden on less prudent households, so-called "energy hogs." I show that the difference in means between above-median and below-median household consumption ...

Private Markets and Public Assistance for Natural Disaster Supplies

By Michael Dinerstein, Nadia Lucas, Ishan Nath, and Johanna Rayl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We document existing allocation mechanisms for natural disaster survival goods, such as flashlights, batteries, food, and water and show that Americans face widespread and frequent exposure to natural disasters, that disasters bring a substantial risk of ...

Home Price Expectations and Spending: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Felix Chopra, Christopher Roth, and Johannes Wohlfart

American Economic Review, July 2025

We conduct a field experiment with US households to study how expectations about long-run home price growth shape spending decisions. We exogenously vary survey respondents' expectations by providing different expert forecasts. Homeowners' spending, measu...

Knowledge Spillovers and Inequality

By Jan Eeckhout and Boyan Jovanovic

American Economic Review, December 2002

We develop a dynamic model with knowledge spillovers in production. The model contains two opposing forces. Imitation of other firms helps followers catch up with leaders, but the prospect of doing so makes followers want to free ride. The second force do...

The Negligible Effect of Free Contraception on Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso

By Pascaline Dupas, Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Pauline Rossi

American Economic Review, August 2025

We conducted a randomized trial among 14,545 households in rural Burkina Faso to test the oft-cited hypothesis that limited access to contraception is an important driver of high fertility rates in West Africa. We do not find support for this hypothesis. ...

Preferences for Firearms

By Sarah Moshary, Bradley T. Shapiro, and Sara Drango

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

This paper provides a critical input into crafting effective firearms policy: an understanding of consumer demand for guns. We estimate individual-level price sensitivity and substitution patterns across gun types using stated-choice experiments. We find ...

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending

By Matias Giaccobasso, Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

Do perceptions about government spending affect willingness to pay taxes? We test this hypothesis with a natural field experiment that focuses on the allocation of property taxes to public schools. Our results show that taxpayers often misperceive the des...

Estimating Individual Discount Rates in Denmark: A Field Experiment

By Glenn W. Harrison, Morten I. Lau, and Melonie B. Williams

American Economic Review, December 2002

The Consumption Origins of Business Cycles: Lessons from Sectoral Dynamics

By Christian Matthes and Felipe Schwartzman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We measure the impact of household consumption shocks on aggregate fluctuations. These shocks affect household consumption directly, and production and prices indirectly through their impact on aggregate consumption. We show how to identify such shocks us...

Preference Reversals of a Different Kind: The "More Is Less" Phenomenon

By John A. List

American Economic Review, December 2002

The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt

By Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Paul Adams, Stefan Hunt, David Laibson, Neil Stewart, and Jesse Leary

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We test a nudge in a field experiment on credit cards. The nudge shrouds the autopay enrollment option for cardholders to automatically pay exactly the credit card minimum payment each month. After six months, the nudge decreases the fraction of cardholde...

Social Welfare Portability and Migration: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Travis Baseler, Ambar Narayan, Odyssia Ng, and Sutirtha Sinha Roy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies a new program designed to make food entitlements portable throughout India. We first characterize the state of food entitlement portability using mystery shoppers and surveys of migrants and distributors. We then inform households about...

Why Regulate Junk Fees?

By Neale Mahoney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

This essay examines the growing prevalence of junk fees, including mandatory back-end fees and hidden add-on charges, which obscure the true cost of goods and services. Drawing on examples from event tickets, hotels, cable bills, restaurants, and financia...

Race and Economic Well-Being in the United States

By Jean-Félix Brouillette, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans, which incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on these factors, welfare for Black Americans was 40 percent of that for White American...

The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a Nine-Year Experiment

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, Daniel Deisenroth, Haritz Garro, Daley Kutzman, Asad Liaqat, and Nils Wernerfelt

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in their news...

Energy, the Stock Market, and the Putty-Clay Investment Model

By Chao Wei

American Economic Review, March 2003

Do Consumers React to Anticipated Income Changes? Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, March 2003