The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers is estimated here. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the...

Monopolies appear throughout health care markets, as a result of patents, limits to the extent of the market, or the presence of unique inputs and skills. In the health care industry, however, the deadweight costs of monopoly may be small or even absent. Health insurance, frequently implemented...

This paper uses the Euler equation and novel data from Berea College students on their consumption expenditures during and after college, desired borrowing amounts, beliefs about post-college earnings, and elicited risk-aversion and time preference parameters to determine their consumption value...

E-Commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate that E-Commerce spending reached 8% of consumption by 2017,...

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i)...

We study how political factors shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition regulation reduces prices, but does not hurt quality of services or...

Information provision is a key element of government energy-efficiency policy, but the information that is provided is often too coarse to allow consumers to make efficient decisions. An important example is the ubiquitous yellow “EnergyGuide” label, which is required by law to be displayed...

Ever since the seminal RAND Health insurance experiment (HIE) was conducted, most health care services, including pharmaceuticals, are deemed to be price inelastic with price elasticities of demand (PED) close to -0.20. However, most studies of PED exploit natural experiments that change demand...

We study how changes in energy input costs for U.S. manufacturers affect the relative welfare of manufacturing producers and consumers (i.e., incidence). We also develop a methodology to estimate the incidence of input taxes which accounts for incomplete pass-through, imperfect competition, and...

We assess the impact of U.S. trade policy uncertainty (TPU) toward China in a tractable general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. We show that increased TPU reduces investment in export entry and technology upgrading, which in turn reduces trade flows and real income for consumers....