Informational nudges to encourage energy conservation or load shifting have been tried in various contexts. This paper studies a program run by a small municipally owned electric utility to reduce ...

The NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC) has two competitive training programs for junior scholars. The RDRC ...

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, ...

This paper tests how people’s moral values influence their views of debt contracts. We ask participants to make decisions about debt contracts in different hypothetical situations (vignettes). We ...

Between the early 1990s and 2015 the relationship between mental despair and age was hump-shaped in the United States: it rose to middle-age, then declined later in life. That relationship has now ...

This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great ...

We revisit the minimum wage-employment debate, which is as old as the Department of Labor. In particular, we assess new studies claiming that the standard panel data approach used in much of the "new ...

Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can ...

We examine the effects of Ukraine’s economic blockade of the anthracite-rich Donbas region, to demonstrate how trade sanctions’ efficacy can be undermined by trade through non-participatory nations.

Novel co-inventors introduce new products or services with the potential for large returns, but do so at high costs and with uncertain outcomes. Similar firms investing in incremental co-invention ...

Renewable electricity generation technology costs have fallen dramatically, investment has grown rapidly, and renewables are now a pillar of climate and decarbonization policy. Part of the credit for ...

This paper presents micro-empirical evidence on the effects of wage-setting decentralization. Our setting is Italy, where employers are required to comply with occupation- and industry-specific wage ...