Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

The concept of diminishing marginal utility is a cornerstone of economic theory. The consumption of a good typically creates satiation that diminishes the marginal utility of consuming more. Temporal satiation induces consumers to increase their stimulation level by seeking variety and therefore...

Every year many states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes and school supplies from the state sales tax. We use two data sets, the Diary portion of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and a unique data set of credit cards transactions, to investigate the...

Online shopping surged in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the pre-pandemic shift toward increased online consumer activity. This trend fed into concerns over the success of top retailers at the expense of smaller ones. Further, it raised questions of whether consumers...

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer spending are of key interest to governments working to...

This paper estimates how online consumer spending responds to changes in air pollution. We address the endogeneity of air pollution in affecting household consumption by exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in air quality caused by China's Huai River heating policy. We use a comprehensive...

Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer’s love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...

This paper starts by showing that in the European car industry, there exist cross-country taste differences along the product attribute dimension that significantly drive net trade patterns and reduce the volume of trade. Further it is shown that, after the creation of the European common...

Consider an economy in which various types of labor are used to produce consumption, but not all types of labor are useful for upgrading the stock of organization capital — that is, for replacing old projects with more productive new projects. When news induces consumers to want to save more,...