The U.S. public transit system represents a multi-billion dollar industry that provides essential transit services to millions of urban residents. We study the market for new transit buses that features a set of non-profit transit agencies purchasing buses primarily from a few domestic bus...

Public transit accounts for only 1% of U.S. passenger miles traveled but nevertheless attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with the most severe roadway delays. These individuals' choices...

Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian...

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...

We seed noisy information to members of a real-world social network to study how information diffusion and information aggregation jointly shape social learning. Our environment features substantial social learning. We show that learning occurs via diffusion which is highly imperfect: signals...

We estimate a model of vehicle choice and miles driven to analyze the impact of fuel conservation policies in the Indian car market. Taxing diesel fuel to equalize diesel and petrol prices would reduce fuel consumption in the new car market by 7% and reduce diesel cars sales by 26%. A tax on...

At political boundaries, local leaders often have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the salience of a tax system affects equilibrium tax rates. To do this, I analyze how toll rates change after toll facilities adopt electronic toll collection. Unlike manual toll collection, in which the driver must hand over cash at the toll collection...

This paper discusses fuel economy regulations in the United States and other countries. We first describe how these programs affect the automobile market, including their impacts on fuel use and other dimensions of the vehicle fleet. We then review different methodologies for assessing the costs...