The history of Daylight Saving Time (DST) has been long and controversial. Throughout its implementation during World Wars I and II, the oil embargo of the 1970s, consistent practice today, and recent extensions, the primary rationale for DST has always been to promote energy conservation....

We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges towards household energy conservation. The average response is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full distribution of responses ranges from -30 to +10 kWh....

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...

Despite growing enthusiasm, there is little empirical evidence on how well energy efficiency investments work. Evidence is particularly lacking from low- and middle-income countries, despite a widespread view that these countries have many of the best opportunities. This paper evaluates a field...

Economists promote energy taxes as cost-effective. But policymakers raise concerns about their regressivity, or disproportional burden on poorer families, preferring to set energy efficiency standards instead. I first show that in theory, regulations targeting energy efficiency are more...

We report the results of a field experiment where we exogenously vary the use of social comparisons "nudges" and subsidies for participation in an in-home energy audit program, and follow subjects through to the subsequent purchase of durable goods. We therefore can compare the causal effect of...

Despite widespread agreement that a carbon tax would be more efficient, many countries use fuel economy standards to reduce transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. We pair a simple model of the automakers' profit maximization problem with unusually-rich nationally representative data on...

“Nudge”-style interventions are often deemed “successful” if they cause large behavior change, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the welfare effects of one especially...

I generalize a benchmark model of directed technical change to allow innovations and factors of production (here energy resources) to be substitutes or complements. I show that a dominant sector is forever locked-in under substitutability but researchers' market incentives can drive a transition...

This paper sets out a framework to evaluate the welfare impacts of residential energy efficiency programs in the presence of imperfect information, behavioral biases, and externalities, then estimates key parameters using a 100,000-household field experiment. Several results run counter to...