This study uses county-level variation in implementation of calorie labeling laws in the US to identify the effects of such laws on body mass. Using the 2003 to 2012 waves of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find a statistically insignificant average treatment effect for women...

Over 250 respondents--graduate students in law and public policy--assessed the risks of climate change and valued climate-change mitigation policies. Many aspects of their behavior were consistent with rational behavior. For example, respondents successfully estimated distributions of...

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 on...

This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard ("behavioral") assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

The ENERGY STAR certification is a voluntary labeling that favors the adoption of energy efficient products. In the US appliance market, the label is a coarse summary of otherwise readily accessible information. Using micro-data of the US refrigerator market, I develop a structural demand model...

We evaluate the effectiveness of energy efficiency labeling in guiding household decisions. Using a carefully designed choice experiment with alternative labels, we disentangle the relative importance of different types of information and intertemporal behavior (i.e., discounting) in guiding...

Since the turn of the last century, nationalistic political parties have been gaining support in Europe. Over the same period, terror attacks have increased. Using data from European Social Surveys (ESS), we examine the effects of terror attacks involving at least one fatality on attitudes...

We study how COVID-19 affected the prevalence, expectations, and attitudes toward remote work using specially designed surveys. The incidence of remote work remains higher than pre-pandemic levels and both men and women expect this to persist post-pandemic. Workers also report increased...

While carbon pricing, in general, and carbon taxes, in particular, are popular with economists, they are subject to considerable misunderstanding among policy makers and the public. In this paper I consider and refute five myths about carbon taxes: 1) that a carbon price will hurt economic...

A full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices. We provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the Michigan...