It is often argued that cost-sharing -- charging a subsidized, positive price -- or a health product is necessary to avoid wasting resources on those who will not use or do not need the product. We explore this argument through a field experiment in Kenya, in which we randomized the price at...

We present an empirical test for the addictiveness of lottery gambling. To distinguish state dependence from serial correlation, we exploit an exogenous shock to local market consumption of lottery gambling. We use the sale of a winning ticket in the zip code, the location of which is random...

Short-run subsidies for health products are common in poor countries. How do they affect long-run adoption? We present a model of technology adoption in which people learn about a technology's effectiveness by using it (or observing others using it) for some time, but people quit using it too...

Additional solid waste disposal imposes resource and environmental costs, but most residents still pay no additional fee per marginal unit of garbage collection. In a simple model with garbage and recycling as the only two disposal options, we show that the optimizing fee for garbage collection...

This paper develops a utility maximizing model of household choice among garbage disposal, recycling, and littering. The impact of a user fee for garbage collection is modelled for heterogeneous households with different preferences for recycling. The model explains (1) why some households...

This paper explores the characteristics of 238 patents on 94 "inventions" contributed by major multinational innovators to the "Eco-Patent Commons", which provides royalty-free access to third parties to patented climate change related innovations. By comparing the pledged patents to other...

The influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs. However, estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection, correlated unobservables, and endogenous group membership. We overcome these identification issues in the context of...

Global climate change poses a threat to the well-being of humans and other living things through impacts on ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, capital productivity, and human health. This paper briefly surveys recent research on the economics of climate change, including theoretical insights...

This chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law %u2013 the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of our...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...