In the absence of a national carbon tax, household driving and electricity consumption impose social costs. Suburbanites drive more and consume more electricity than center city residents. If more suburbanites purchase electric vehicles (EV) and install solar panels, then their greenhouse gas...

This paper investigates how concern for the environment translates into predictable patterns of consumer behavior. Two types of behavior are considered. First, individuals who care about environmental quality may voluntarily restrain their consumption of goods and services that generate a...

Financial institutions have both investors and customers. Investors, such as those who invest in stocks and bonds or private/public-sector guarantors of institutions, expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return in exchange for the financing and risk-bearing that they provide. Customers of a...

Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spending as antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we present an alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in their information about the economic situation,...

The absence of self-control is often viewed as an important correlate of persistent poverty. Using a standard intertemporal allocation problem with credit constraints faced by an individual with quasi- hyperbolic preferences, we argue that poverty damages the ability to exercise self-control....

Although recent evidence suggests that non-cognitive skills such as engagement matter for academic and economic success, there is little evidence on how key educational inputs affect the development of these skills. We present a re-analysis of follow-up data from the Project STAR class-size...

Comprehensive evaluation requires tracking indirect effects of interventions, such as politicians and constituents reacting to the arrival of a development program. We study political economy responses to a large scale intervention in Bangladesh, where 346 communities consisting of 16,600...

We study the correlation between a belief concerning individualism and a measure of luck in the US during the period 1983-2004. The measure of beliefs is the answer to a question related to whether the poor should be helped by the government or if they should help themselves, while the measure...

Much economic policy is deliberately shifted away from direct political processes to administrative processes --- political pressure deflection. Pressure deflection poses a puzzle to standard political economy models which suggest that having policies to `sell' is valuable to politicians. The...

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle--measured with unemployment rates--and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity,...