Regulatory regimes that have increased household energy efficiency are of widespread interest to policymakers today. A prominent example is the state of California where electricity intensities in the residential sector have stayed near constant since the 1970s in sharp contrast to nationwide...

Electricity courses through our lives. Yet, there are still more than a billion people worldwide who are not connected to the grid, and many more get abysmal supply, unlike the 24/7/365 flow that rich countries take for granted. We argue that these shortfalls are due to a sad irony: treating...

Domestic mobility restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 are widespread in developing countries, and have trapped millions of migrant workers in hotspot cities. We show that bans can increase cumulative infections relative to a counterfactual sans restrictions. A SEIR model shows bans’...

Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use, in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers,...

Scientific evidence suggests the Earth is undergoing a mass extinction of species, caused by human activity. Evaluating the social costs of losing non-human species is necessary to manage biodiversity and target conservation resources. We show that the functional extinction of vultures in India...

Fertility decline, driven by the one-child policy, and son preference have contributed to an alarming difference in the number of live male and female births in China. We present a quantitative model where people choose to sex-select because they perceive that married sons are more valuable than...