Imperfect information is widely acknowledged to hamper the adoption of energy efficient technologies. In this paper, we study supply-side implications of the associated incentive structure. We build on existing evidence suggesting that energy efficiency owns a credence component, whereby the...

This field experiment quantifies the impact of social norm information on the demand for indoor temperature. Based on high-frequency data from indoor temperature monitors, we provide participating households with a comparison of average temperature in their apartments relative to that measured...

Social comparison feedback, i.e. informing people about the behavior of others, has been shown to influence prosocial behavior in many domains, including tax compliance and energy conservation. We argue that heterogeneity in people's (un)willingness to consult the corresponding information...

Ambiguous tasks present information that is subject to varying interpretations. Extensive research suggests that ambiguous tasks may lead to dishonest behaviour in various contexts (e.g. claiming back expenses or setting project deadlines), because individuals interpret the information in...

We study the capacity to meet food demand under conditions of climate change, economic and population growth. We take a novel approach to quantifying climate impacts, based on a model of the global economy structurally estimated on the period 1960 to 2015. The model integrates several features...

We document firms' adjustment channels to minimum wage regulation, leveraging an unexpected Supreme Court ruling mandating the Swiss canton Neuchâtel to enforce a minimum hourly wage of around CHF20 (approx. USD 20) previously accepted via popular ballot. Given policy discontinuity at cantonal...

We design a survey to provide quantitative evidence about household demand for qualitative aspects of tap water supply. We focus on two characteristics that are of importance for households: water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste, smell and appearance. Our survey elicits...

In response to the perceived quality of a public good, households may choose to incur averting expenditures as a substitute to its aggregate provision, thereby revealing an (inverse) demand function. When unobserved heterogeneity affects both perceived quality and averting behavior,...

How much will the global population expand, can all these extra mouths be fed, and what is the role in this story of economic growth? We structurally estimate a two-sector Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous population and finite land reserves to study the long-run evolution of global...

This paper describes the implementation in GAMS of an economic equilibrium model based on the GTAP version 9 dataset. We call this model and the ancillary programming tools GTAPINGAMS, version 9. Relative to previous installments of GTAPINGAMS, an innovation in this model is that it can easily...