This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in SME failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 "time-bomb" for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain...

We study a prominent energy regulation affecting large Chinese manufacturers that are part of broader conglomerates. Using detailed firm-level data and difference-in-differences research designs, we show that regulated firms cut output and shifted production to unregulated firms in the same...

This study examines a field experiment in Texas that includes pricing and informational interventions to encourage energy conservation during summer peak load days when the social cost of generation is the highest. We estimate that our critical peak pricing intervention reduces electricity...

The intermittency of payment for many goods creates a disconnect between paying and consuming such that the marginal price is not always salient when consumption decisions are made. This paper derives optimal dynamic corrective taxes when there are externalities as well as internalities from...

Economic theory suggests that energy subsidies can lead to excessive consumption and environmental degradation. However, the precise impact of energy subsidies is not well understood. We analyze a large energy subsidy: the California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE). CARE provides a price...

We study a problem in which policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in social welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects and marginal treatment responses arise as key statistics to characterize social...

This paper uses monthly zip code-level data on electricity disconnections to document the socioeconomic correlates of extreme economic distress among 5 million customers in Illinois. In 2018-2019, customers in Black and Hispanic zip codes were about 4 times more likely to be disconnected for...

We provide the first at-scale estimate of electric vehicle (EV) home charging. Previous estimates are either based on surveys that reach conflicting conclusions, or are extrapolated from a small, unrepresentative sample of households with dedicated EV meters. We combine billions of hourly...