Policymakers often assert that consumers undervalue future gasoline costs when they buy automobiles. We test this by measuring whether relative prices of vehicles with different fuel economy ratings fully adjust to variation in gasoline prices. Vehicle prices move as if consumers are indifferent...

Behavioral decision research has profoundly changed our understanding of decision-making. Recent research has begun to explore how behavioral insights can influence behavior in the world, at scale. This work often involves field experiments studying outcomes over short time windows. We study a...

This paper evaluates a series of programs run by a company called OPOWER to send Home Energy Report letters to residential utility customers comparing their electricity use to that of their neighbors. Using data from randomized natural field experiments at 600,000 treatment and control...

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency "action and backsliding," but these cycles attenuate over time....

Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. This paper evaluates the first program to expose residential consumers to hourly real-time pricing (RTP). I find that enrolled households are...

It is often asserted that consumers purchasing automobiles or other goods and services underweight the costs of gasoline or other "add-ons." We test this hypothesis in the US automobile market by examining the effects of time series variation in gasoline price expectations on the prices and...

This paper brings together the literatures on the political economy of public expenditures and the determinants of economic growth. Based on a new dataset of rural public expenditures in a panel of Latin American economies, the econometric evidence suggests that non-social subsidies reduce...