Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? We answer this question by providing bounds on welfare that hold for families of demand curves commonly considered in different...

We provide a method to measure welfare, in money-metric terms, taking into account expectations about the future. Our two key assumptions are that (1) the expenditure function is separable between the present and the future, and (2) there are some households that do not face idiosyncratic...

I develop a technique useful for obtaining more precise estimates of demand and supply curves when constrained to market-level data. It augments the estimation routine with data on the average characteristics of consumers that purchase different products. I apply the technique to the automobile...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to stark reductions in economic activity in India. We employ CMIE's Consumer Pyramids Household Survey to examine the timing, distribution, and mechanism of the impacts from this shock on income and consumption through December 2020. First, we estimate large and...

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,...

We study the effect of price salience on whether a product is purchased and, conditional on purchase, the quality purchased. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that making the full purchase price salient to consumers reduces both the quality and quantity of goods purchased. The...

A long literature has developed econometric methods for estimating individual-consumer-level demand systems that accommodate corner solutions. The increasing access to transaction-level customer purchase histories across a wide array of markets and industries vastly expands the prospect for...

In old age, consumption can fluctuate because of shocks to available resources and because health shocks affect utility from consumption. We find that even temporary drops in income and health are associated with drops in consumption and most of the effect of temporary drops in health on...

As billions of people in the developing world seek to increase their living standards, their aspirations pose a challenge to global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The emerging middle class are buying and operating energy intensive durables ranging from vehicles to air conditioners to...

This paper studies the optimal design of second-best corrective regulation, when some agents or activities cannot be perfectly regulated. We show that policy elasticities and Pigouvian wedges are sufficient statistics to characterize the marginal welfare impact of regulatory policies in a large...