This paper investigates how inequality affects what the poor consider necessary to purchase. Using detailed information on the consumption choices of a large sample of poor households in India, we first provide evidence that inequality tends to make luxuries more necessary to the poor (their...

This paper provides direct field-level evidence of positional externalities in the size of neighboring houses. Combining data from the American Housing Survey with a geolocalized data set of three million suburban houses, I find that new constructions at the top of the house size distribution...

This article provides evidence from a natural experiment on the relationship between employee affect and productivity. We link highly detailed administrative data on the performance of all telesales workers at British Telecom with survey reports of employee happiness we collected on a weekly...

Despite the importance of visual information for consumer decision-making, quantifying consumer visual interest for brands and products across markets and over time remains arduous. This paper introduces Excess Image Search (EIS) as a new behavioral, high-frequency, time- and space-varying, and...

Although we know that social movements affect beliefs and public policies, it is not clear how they impact consumption. To address this question, we examine whether and how #MeToo — a preeminent global social movement raising awareness of sexual abuse and harassment against women — affected...

Combining multiple waves of survey data on house satisfaction with a geolocalized data set of three million suburban houses, this paper provides direct quasi-experimental evidence of positional externalities in the field. Homeowners exposed to the construction of very large houses in their...