What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

This paper introduces a novel measure of consumer inflation expectations: We elicit and combine inflation forecasts across categories of personal consumption expenditure to form an aggregated measure of inflation expectations. Drawing on nearly 60,000 respondents, our data comprise the early...

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...

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...

We study how organizational boundaries affect pricing decisions using comprehensive data from a large U.S. airline. We document that the firm's advanced pricing algorithm, utilizing inputs from different organizational teams, is subject to multiple biases. To quantify the impacts of these...

This paper derives a preference for data privacy from consumers' temptation utility. This approach facilitates a welfare analysis of different data privacy regulations, such as the GDPR enacted by the European Union and the CCPA enacted by the state of California, when a fraction of the...

It is often argued that people might take on too much high-cost debt because they are present focused and/or overoptimistic about how soon they will repay. We measure borrowers' present focus and overoptimism using an experiment with a large payday lender. Although the most inexperienced...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

Using new surveys on more than 40,000 respondents in twenty countries that account for 72% of global CO2 emissions, we study the understanding of and attitudes toward climate change and climate policies. We show that, across countries, support for climate policies hinges on three key perceptions...