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...

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...

The literature has shown the power of social norms to promote residential energy conservation, particularly among high usage users. This study uses a natural field experiment with nearly 200,000 US households to explore whether a financial rewards program can complement such approaches. We...

The firm response to regulation is seldom as controversial as in the context of fuel economy standards, a dominant policy to reduce emissions from vehicles worldwide. It has long been argued that such standards lead to vehicle weight changes that increase accident fatalities. Using unconditional...

The Chinese automobile market is the largest in the world with annual sales exceeding 20 million vehicles. The tremendous growth in sales---over 200 percent from 2008 to 2015---and concerns over local air quality have prompted China's policy makers to incentivize the adoption of more fuel...

Information provision is a key element of government energy-efficiency policy, but the information that is provided is often too coarse to allow consumers to make efficient decisions. An important example is the ubiquitous yellow “EnergyGuide” label, which is required by law to be displayed...

The effectiveness of investment subsidies depends on the existing array of regulatory and information mandates, especially in the energy efficiency space. Some consumers respond to information disclosure by purchasing energy-efficient durables (and thus may increase the inframarginal take-up of...

Pigouvian taxes can fully correct for market failures due to externalities, but actual policies are commonly forced to deviate from the Pigouvian ideal due to administrative or political constraints. This paper derives sufficient statistics, which require a minimum of market information, that...

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for various economic activities. To investigate the persistence of such interventions, we randomly assigned households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy...

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from “Modlet” in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...