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Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Peer Effects in Residential Water Conservation: Evidence from Migration

By Bryan Bollinger, Jesse Burkhardt, and Kenneth T. Gillingham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

Social interactions are widely understood to influence consumer decisions in many choice settings. This paper identifies causal peer effects in residential water conservation during the summer using variation from movers. We classify high-resolution remot...

Misunderstanding Nonlinear Prices: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Residential Electricity Demand

By Blake Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

This paper examines how consumers respond to nonlinear prices. Exploiting a natural experiment with electricity consumers in British Columbia, I find evidence that some households severely misunderstand nonlinear prices—incorrectly perceiving that the m...

How Well Targeted Are Soda Taxes?

By Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Martin O'Connell

American Economic Review, November 2020

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who is most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual-specific preferences....

Can Rationing Increase Welfare? Theory and an Application to India's Ration Shop System

By Lucie Gadenne

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

In many developing countries, households can purchase limited quantities of goods at a fixed subsidized price through ration shops. This paper asks whether the characteristics of developing countries explain why governments use such systems. I find an equ...

What Makes a Rule Complex?

By Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study the complexity of rules by paying experimental subjects to implement a series of algorithms and then eliciting their willingness-to-pay to avoid implementing them again in the future. The design allows us to examine hypotheses from the theoretica...

Asymmetric Consumption Smoothing

By Brian Baugh, Itzhak Ben-David, Hoonsuk Park, and Jonathan A. Parker

American Economic Review, January 2021

Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in ...

What Makes a Rule Complex? Erratum

By Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, February 2021

The Long-Run Effects of a Public Policy on Alcohol Tastes and Mortality

By Lorenz Kueng and Evgeny Yakovlev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2021

We study the long-run effects of Russia's anti-alcohol campaign, which dramatically altered the relative supply of hard and light alcohol in the late 1980s. We find that this policy shifted young men's long-run preferences from hard to light alcohol dec...

Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe

By Emily Oster

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

What Motivates Paternalism? An Experimental Study

By Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2021

We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others' choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to ...

Job Displacement Insurance and (the Lack of) Consumption-Smoothing

By François Gerard and Joana Naritomi

American Economic Review, March 2021

We study the spending profile of workers who experience both a positive transitory income shock (lump-sum severance pay) and a negative permanent income shock (layoff ). Using de-identified expenditure and employment data from Brazil, we show that workers...

Consumer Confidence and Consumer Spending

[Symposium: Consumer Confidence]

By Sydney C. Ludvigson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Despite the widespread attention given to surveys of consumer confidence, the mechanisms by which household attitudes influence the real economy are less well understood. This paper begins with an overview of how consumer confidence is measured and report...

How Should We Measure Consumer Confidence?

[Symposium: Consumer Confidence]

By Jeff Dominitz and Charles F. Manski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Research on consumer confidence has mainly sought to evaluate the power of available data to predict economic outcomes. In contrast, this article considers how best to measure consumer confidence. We analyze the responses to eight questions that have appe...

The Impact of an Epidemic: Experimental Evidence on Preference Stability from Wuhan

By Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, and Lijia Wei

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine how the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Hubei province of China impacted pro-social behavior and attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. The study repeatedly applies a panel of financially incentivized individual and strategic decision tas...

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High-Frequency Transaction Data

By Haiqiang Chen, Wenlan Qian, and Qiang Wen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use daily transaction data in 214 cities to study the impact of COVID-19 on consumption after China's outbreak in late January 2020. Based on difference-in-difference estimation, daily offline consumption—via bank card and mobile Quick Response code ...

Estimating the Elasticity to Real-Time Pricing: Evidence from the Spanish Electricity Market

By Natalia Fabra, David Rapson, Mar Reguant, and Jingyuan Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We estimate consumer response to the first large-scale real-time electricity pricing (RTP) program. In 2015, RTP became the default tariff for residential customers in Spain, exposing them to prices that vary hourly based on day-ahead wholesale prices. Us...

Machine Learning about Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: The Case of Household Energy Use

By Christopher R. Knittel and Samuel Stolper

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges toward household energy conservation. The average response to treatment is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full di...

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Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s

By Robert B. Barsky and Lutz Kilian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions, periods of excessive inflation, reduced productivity and lower economic growth. In this paper, we review the arguments supporting such views. First, we highlight some of the conceptual dif...