We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are...

Quantifying heterogeneity in consumers' misperceptions of product costs is crucial for policy design. We illustrate this point in the energy context and the design of Pigouvian policies. We estimate non-parametric distributions of perceptions of energy costs in the U.S. appliance market using a...

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 use an experiment to test whether consumers optimally acquire information on energy costs in appliance markets where, like many contexts, consumers are poorly informed and make mistakes despite freely-available information. We find consumers acquire information suboptimally; there is little...

Mandatory disclosure policies are increasingly prevalent despite sparse evidence that they improve market outcomes. We study the effects of requiring home sellers to provide buyers with certified audits of residential energy efficiency. Using similar nearby homes as a comparison group, we find...

State-level building energy codes have been around for over 40 years, but recent empirical research has cast doubt on their effectiveness. A potential virtue of standards-based policies is that they may be less regressive than explicit taxes on energy consumption. However, this conjecture has...

Aligning compensation with recipient outcomes has the potential to improve the efficiency of government programs. We perform a field experiment to evaluate the impact of performance bonuses on the returns to spending in a large low-income energy efficiency assistance program. We find that...

Building energy efficiency has been a cornerstone of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies for decades. However, impact evaluations have revealed that energy savings typically fall short of engineering model forecasts that currently guide funding decisions. This creates a resource allocation...

A central question in the analysis of fuel-economy policy is whether consumers are myopic with regards to future fuel costs. We provide the first evidence on consumer valuation of fuel economy from a natural experiment. We examine the short-run equilibrium effects of an exogenous restatement of...

The behavioral responses to taxes and subsidies are often subject to various behavioral biases and transaction costs--what we define as "microfrictions." We develop a theoretical framework to show how these microfrictions--and their heterogeneity across the population and policy...