We use detailed data from a large retail panel to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the composition and nutrient content of foods purchased for at-home consumption. We find that the effect of SNAP participation is small relative to the...

There is growing debate about whether consumer subsidies related to nutrition programs should be more flexible. Additional flexibility increases consumer welfare, but may hinder efforts towards achieving nutrition goals. We study how consumers would respond to subsidy designs with different...

The Bolivian government fostered an electricity cost supporting scheme to attenuate the effect of the nationwide full lockdown on domestic consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper evaluates its effect on the levels of energy consumption during lockdown, and the monetary savings it...

Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited...

In response to the low fertility rate and high child poverty in Poland, the government implemented the Family 500+ program which provides cash transfers to families with two or more children, and low-income, one-child families. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we explore the causal...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

A model of rational addiction (RA) with optimal inventories is developed and empirically tested using data on purchases in Japan. If a consumer has information regarding a future price increase, then she may hoard addictive goods; in this case, the optimal inventory period increases with the...