In a field experiment with 341 participants, we study whether social comparisons, either in isolation or in combination with a climate-related moral appeal, can change the use of public and car-related transportation. We do so in the context of a mobility budget offered to employees of a large...

Models of shrouding predict that firms lack incentives to compete on add-on prices. Working with a large Turkish bank to test SMS direct marketing promotions to 108,000 existing checking account holders, we find that messages promoting a large discount on the overdraft interest rate reduce...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

The interaction between habit formation and pollution-type ex- ternalities modifies the social optimum through discount effects and elasticity effects. If the substitution elasticity does not exceed unity, both effects reduce optimal consumption and capital in the long run, and the optimal...

We study the general equilibrium properties of two growth models with overlapping generations, habit formation and endogenous fertility. In the neoclassical model, habits modify the economy's growth rate and generate transitional dynamics in fertility; station- ary income per capita is...

We analyze the consequences of habit formation for income levels and long-term growth in an overlapping generations model with dynastic altruism and resource dependence. If the strength of habits is below a critical level, the competitive economy displays an altruistic (Ramsey-like) equilibrium...

Habits are an important cause of sluggish consumption adjustment in response to price shocks. This paper studies shifts within the consumption bundle under endogenous habit formation. I put forward a model with good-specific, or ’deep’, habits that cause persistence in good-specific...

We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the extent to which dietary habits are malleable early on in childhood and later in life. We implement two treatments one that targets what people eat, the other that targets the timing and frequency of food intake. 285 low income families with young...

The utility maximization problem of ratchet investors who do not tolerate any decline in their consumption rate is solved explicitly for all felicity functions in a Markovian framework which includes Brownian motion and Poisson processes as special cases. The optimal consumption plan turns out...

In this paper I investigate the nexus between life time utility (life satisfaction) and income predicted by the standard model of endogenous economic growth under different behavioral assumptions. The solution rationalizes why the empirical association between income and life satisfaction is...