Are the Non-monetary Costs of Energy Efficiency Investments Large? Understanding Low Take-Up of a Free Energy Efficiency Program

By Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document very low take-up of an energy efficiency program that is widely believed to be privately beneficial. Program participants receive a substantial home "weatherization" retrofit; all installation and equipment costs are covered by the program. Le...

Imperfect Public Monitoring with Costly Punishment: An Experimental Study

By Attila Ambrus and Ben Greiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

This paper experimentally investigates the effects of a costly punishment option on cooperation and social welfare in long, finitely repeated public good contribution games. In a perfect monitoring environment, increasing the severity of the potential p...

A Continuous Dilemma

By Daniel Friedman and Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, February 2012

We study prisoners' dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation is about 90 percent. Control sessions with repeated matchings over eight subperiods achieve less tha...

Ascending Prices and Package Bidding: A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis

By John H. Kagel, Yuanchuan Lien, and Paul Milgrom

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010

We use theory and experiment to explore the performance of multi-round, price-guided, combinatorial auctions. We define efficiency-relevant and core-relevant packages and show that if bidders bid aggressively on these and losing bidders bid to their limit...

Creating a Smarter U.S. Electricity Grid

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Paul L. Joskow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

This paper focuses on efforts to build what policymakers call the "smart grid," involving 1) improved remote monitoring and automatic and remote control of facilities in high-voltage electricity transmission networks; 2) improved remote monitoring, two-wa...

Saving Social Security

[Symposium: Social Security Reform]

By Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Social Security is one of America's most successful government programs. It has helped millions of Americans avoid poverty in old age. To be sure, the program faces a long-term deficit and is in need of updating. But Social Security's long-term financial ...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

Induced Innovation and Energy Prices

By David Popp

American Economic Review, March 2002

I use U.S. patent data from 1970 to 1994 to estimate the effect of energy prices on energy-efficient innovations. Using patent citations to construct a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge, I consider the effect of both d...

Early Life Health Interventions and Academic Achievement

By Prashant Bharadwaj, Katrine Vellesen Løken, and Christopher Neilson

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of...

The Labor Supply Effects of Delayed First Birth

By Jane Leber Herr

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper I compare the relationship between first-birth timing and post-birth labor supply for high school and college graduate mothers. Given that pre-birth wages are increasing in fertility delay, the rising opportunity cost of time would suggest t...

The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations

By Charles R. Plott and Kathryn Zeiler

American Economic Review, June 2005

We conduct experiments to explore the possibility that subject misconceptions, as opposed to a particular theory of preferences referred to as the "endowment effect," account for reported gaps between willingness to pay ("WTP") and willingness to accept (...

Airline Pricing, Price Dispersion, and Ticket Characteristics on and off the Internet

By Anirban Sengupta and Steven N. Wiggins

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

This paper uses transaction data to investigate the effects of Internet purchase on airline fares. Our data include ticket characteristics, restrictions, flight load factors, and dates and channel of purchase. Controlling for ticket and flight characte...

The Growth of Temporary Services Work

By Lewis M. Segal and Daniel G. Sullivan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Temporary services employment grew rapidly over the past several decades and now accounts for a sizable fraction of aggregate employment. The authors use Current Population Survey data to examine the changing nature of temporary work and discuss explanati...

The Financial Crisis: Lessons for International Macroeconomics

By Matthieu Bussière, Jean Imbs, Robert Kollmann, and Romain Rancière

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

This article introduces a special section of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, containing five papers presented during a conference in Paris in October 2011. The aim of the conference was to derive lessons from the financial crisis, for re...

Self-Interest through Delegation: An Additional Rationale for the Principal-Agent Relationship

By John R. Hamman, George Loewenstein, and Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, September 2010

Principal-agent relationships are typically assumed to be motivated by efficiency gains from comparative advantage. However, principals may also delegate tasks to avoid taking direct responsibility for selfish or unethical behavior. We report three labora...

Improving the Design of Conditional Transfer Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Education Experiment in Colombia

By Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Marianne Bertrand, Leigh L. Linden, and Francisco Perez-Calle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

Using a student level randomization, we compare three education-based conditional cash transfers designs: a standard design, a design where part of the monthly transfers are postponed until children have to re-enroll in school, and a design that lowers th...

Putting the Parts Together: Trade, Vertical Linkages, and Business Cycle Comovement

By Julian di Giovanni and Andrei A. Levchenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Countries that trade more with each other exhibit higher business cycle correlation. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying this relationship using a large cross-country, industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. We sho...

Innovation and Climate Change Policy

By Joshua S. Gans

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

This paper examines whether climate change policies will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. The model demonstrates that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this will diminish incentives to ...

Does Money Illusion Matter? Comment

By Luba Petersen and Abel Winn

American Economic Review, March 2014

This paper experimentally investigates whether money illusion generates substantial nominal inertia. Building on the design of Fehr and Tyran (2001), we find no evidence that agents choose high nominal payoffs over high real payoffs. However, participants...

Satellites, Self-Reports, and Submersion: Exposure to Floods in Bangladesh

By Raymond Guiteras, Amir Jina, and A. Mushfiq Mobarak

American Economic Review, May 2015

A burgeoning "Climate-Economy" literature has uncovered many effects of changes in temperature and precipitation on economic activity, but has made considerably less progress in modeling the effects of other associated phenomena, like natural disasters. W...