economies of scale in energy use in adult only households the residential sector is responsible for 18 of australia s primary energy use thus improved knowledge about household energy use is vital to future energy management this study examines economies of scale in energy use and expenditure among adult only households and across three adult only household types significant economies of scale are found in all cases small households suffer a double penalty of greater per capita energy use and higher charge per unit of energy with older households the most affected the trend towards smaller average household size means that economies of scale are continually being lost offsetting gains in energy efficiency achieved through other means

limited commitment and the demand for money understanding money demand is important for our comprehension of macroeconomics and monetary policy its instability has made this a challenge common explications for the instability are financial regulations and financial innovations that shift the money demand function we provide a complementary view by showing that a model where borrowers have limited commitment can significantly improve the fit between the theoretical money demand function and the data limited commitment can also explain why the ratio of credit to m1 is currently so low despite that nominal interest rates are at their lowest recorded levels this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

money demand in japan and nonlinear cointegration we estimate the long run japanese money demand function in a cointegration framework with two nonlinear functional forms that allow for the liquidity trap and compare the results with the standard log level functional form in addition to the conventional linear cointegration techniques we also use a recently developed procedure for nonlinear cointegration that allows the estimation of alternative functional forms under the same assumption regarding the trend properties of the nominal interest rate the nonlinear functional forms outperform the log level functional form based on out of sample prediction performance

how to identify trust and reciprocity this paper uses a three games or triadic design to identify trusting and reciprocating behavior a large literature on single game trust and reciprocity experiments is based on the implicit assumption that subjects do not have altruistic or inequality averse other regarding preferences such experimental designs test compound hypotheses that include the hypothesis that other regarding preferences do not affect behavior in contrast experiments with the triadic design do discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or reciprocity and transfers resulting from other regarding preferences that are not conditional on the behavior of others decomposing trust from altruism and reciprocity from altruism or inequality aversion is critical to obtaining empirical information that can guide the process of constructing models that can increase the empirical validity of game theory

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

analysis of the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior by incorporating multiple self selection effects abstract it is expected that the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior might correlate with each other besides due to the existence of self selection effects the observed inter relationship between them might be the spurious result of the fact that some unobserved variables are causing both these concerns motivate us to 1 consider residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior for both in home appliances and out of home cars simultaneously and 2 explicitly control self selection effects so as to capture a relatively true effect of land use policy on household energy consumption behavior an integrated model termed as joint mixed multinomial logit multiple discrete continuous extreme value model is presented here to identify the sensitivity of household energy consumption to land use policy by considering multiple self selection effects the model results indicate that land use policy do play a great role in changing beijing residents energy consumption pattern while the self selection effects cannot be ignored when evaluating the effect of land use policy based on the policy scenario design it is found that increasing recreational facilities and bus lines in the neighborhood can greatly promote household s energy saving behavior additionally the importance of soft policy and package policy is also emphasized in the context of beijing

home energy use in nine oecd countries 1960 1980 abstract government institutions and individuals have responded to fluctuations in energy supply and price with the implementation of policies and the initiation of conservation while these activities have resulted in noticeable conservation of energy primarily through behavioural actions further savings could be achieved through the exchange of information regarding promising policies and technologies toward this end data on residential sector energy use for nine oecd countries canada denmark france west germany italy japan sweden the uk and the usa have been collected over the period 1960 1980 and have been analysed using both indicators of energy use intensity and econometric methods

trust and reciprocity between spouses in india abstract i present results from the first trust game conducted among married couples the experiment consisted of a one shot trust game where spouses were taken into separate rooms not allowed to communicate given a significant endowment and both strategies and payoffs were common knowledge results indicate that only 3 percent of spouses in the sender role transfer the entire amount the average proportion sent is 57 percent of the endowment the limited sending is costly because the household on average is walking away with half of the potential earnings the results provide further evidence of the lack of pareto efficiency within the household

interfuel competition in france and west germany abstract this article presents a simple and practical methodology to analyse the annual evolution of an energy market the point of departure is to evaluate the effects of interfuel substitution economic growth and energy efficiency on demand for each fuel the model should permit us to evaluate the annual changes in energy mix probably one of the concepts that casts most light is the one here called available market for competition that gives an adjusted picture of interfuel substitution the model has been used to study the household and industrial energy markets of france and west germany

keynesian government spending multipliers and spillovers in the euro area the global financial crisis has led to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending the keynesian multiplier effect thus we investigate whether the spending package announced by euro area governments for 2009 and 2010 is likely to boost gdp by more than one for one because of modelling uncertainty it is essential that such policy evaluations be robust to alternative modelling assumptions and parameterizations we use five different empirical macroeconomic models with keynesian features such as price and wage rigidities to evaluate the impact of the fiscal stimulus four of them suggest that the planned increase in government spending will reduce private consumption and investment significantly only a model that largely ignores the forward looking behavioural response of consumers and firms implies crowding in of private spending we review a range of issues that may play a role in the recession of 2008 2009 implementation lags are found to reinforce crowding out and may even cause an initial contraction zero bound effects may lead the central bank to abstain from interest rate hikes and increase the gdp impact of government spending crowding in however requires an immediate anticipation of at least two years at the zero bound using a multi country model we find that spillovers between euro area countries are negligible or even negative because direct demand effects are offset by the indirect effect of a euro appreciation new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models provide a strong case for government savings packages announced with sufficient lead time spending cuts induce a significant short run stimulus and crowding in of private spending tobias cwik and volker wieland

interfuel competition in the industrial sector of seven oecd countries abstract the purpose of this article is to present an analysis of interfuel substitution in the industrial sector of seven major oecd countries the united states canada japan germany france the united kingdom and italy over the 1960 1993 period translog models are used to provide estimates of price elasticities from annual data for each country results outline the weakness of price elasticities and changes in behaviour over the last 35 years and show evidence of asymmetric effects since the collapse of oil prices in 1986 substitution has stopped industrial energy demand and oil consumption have stagnated interfuel substitution is widely induced by events other than relative price changes energy policy political and institutional constraints changes in economic activity characteristics within individual country sectors

decomposition analysis of the variations in residential electricity consumption in brazil for the 1980 2007 period measuring the activity intensity and structure effects abstract introduced at the end of the 1970s to study the impacts of structural changes on electricity consumption by industry index decomposition analysis techniques have been extended to various other areas to help in the formulation of energy policies notably in developed countries however few authors have applied these techniques to study the evolution of energy consumption in developing countries in brazil the few available studies have focused only on the industrial sector in this article we apply the decomposition technique called the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi to electricity consumption of the brazilian residential sector to explain its evolution in terms of the activity structure and intensity affects over the period from 1980 to 2007 the technique is sufficiently robust and flexible to perform this analysis by disaggregating residential consumers by consumption classes and regions of the country among the main results is measurement of the impact of government programs for income transfer and universal service on variations in residential consumption typical of developing countries

on energy coefficients and ratios abstract this paper examines the methodological issues of the debates surrounding the problem of measuring energy consumption and the use of the concept of energy coefficients it also investigates the brookes hypothesis of a development effect on energy consumption the results suggest that when energy consumption is appropriately measured the energy coefficients are very consistent and fall steadily from high values tending asymptotically to one

residential energy demand in brazil by income classes issues for the energy sector abstract due to the lack of reliable statistical information the majority of analyses concerning the structure of developing countries energy market of developing countries do not disaggregate the demand by income classes this component offers important strategies for energy planning in these countries by making it possible to quantify the portions of society which have not entered the energy market and are more affected by internal energy price rises this approach also emphasizes that the bulk of energy is consumed by a small fraction of the population while a significant proportion of households do not benefit from energy services issues such as energy conservation pricing and energy distribution and the impact of technological changes must be dealt with differently in developing countries including the characteristics of the structure of their energy markets according to income classes

electricity output ratio and sectoral electricity use the case of east and southeast asian developing countries abstract continuing a recent line of investigation the relationship between electricity use and economic growth and the changes in the sectoral composition of electricity consumption are examined for eight developing countries in east and southeast asia it is found that the relative rate of growth of electricity consumption to gdp declined over time and there were no systematic variations in the sectoral composition of electricity use both over time and across countries

money demand and the effects of fiscal policies this paper reexamines the choice of the scale variable in the money demand function a variety of evidence suggests that consumer spending is a better scale variable than gnp changing the money demand specification along these lines can profoundly affect the standard keynesian analysis of a tax cut copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

is the allocation of resources within the household efficient new evidence from a randomized experiment i study whether households make pareto efficient intrahousehold resource allocation decisions combining randomized variation in women s income generated by the evaluation of the mexican progresa program with variation attributable to localized rainfall shocks as distribution factors in the collective model i find evidence favoring pareto optimality more specifically female specific income changes have positive effects on children s goods expenditures whereas changes due to rainfall shocks have a smaller influence on household public goods expenditures the evidence is consistent with female partners having greater sensitivity to own income changes and norms that oblige women to devote their earnings to meet collective consumption needs

money financed fiscal stimulus the effects of implementation lag abstract previous studies argue that based on the new keynesian framework a fiscal stimulus financed by money creation has a strong positive effect on output under a reasonable degree of nominal price rigidities this paper investigates the effects of an implementation lag in a money financed fiscal stimulus on output we show that if a money financed government purchase has a time lag between the decision and the implementation 1 it may cause a recession rather than a boom when the economy is in normal times 2 it may deepen a recession when the economy is in a liquidity trap 3 the longer the implementation lag the deeper the recession and 4 the depth of the recession depends on the interest semi elasticity of money demand our results imply that if money demand is unstable the money financed fiscal stimulus with an implementation lag may have unstable effects on output in contrast to the debt financed fiscal stimulus

quantifying tax effects under policy foresight abstract studies of tax effects make the conventional information assumption that changes in period t taxes become known at t legislative lags however imply that news arrives before tax changes take place under policy foreknowledge the conventional information structure is therefore misspecified simulations of a standard neoclassical growth model suggest that foresight of only one quarter can distort substantially the estimates of tax effects obtained under the no foresight assumption also it is crucial to model capital and labor taxes separately anticipated changes in these two tax policies have opposite effects on consumption investment labor and output before policy realization

evolution of an aging society and effect on residential energy demand the development of an aged society paired with a growing number of elderly households is expected to increase residential energy demand this study is designed to analyze various factors which determine the energy demand of elderly households and to predict the future of residential energy consumption in an aging society in addition comparing the factors with those in western countries which contain a population of increasing age we try to clarify characteristics of the elderly and residential energy demand then propose possible future subjects for study

government investment and fiscal stimulus effects of government investment are studied in an estimated neoclassical growth model the analysis focuses on two dimensions that are critical for understanding government investment as a fiscal stimulus implementation delays for building public capital and expected fiscal adjustments to deficit financed spending implementation delays can produce small or even negative labor and output responses to increases in government investment in the short run anticipated fiscal adjustments matter both quantitatively and qualitatively for long run growth effects when public capital is insufficiently productive distorting financing can make government investment contractionary at longer horizons

an indirect utility model of car ownership and private car use abstract in this paper a model is developed for the simultaneous determination of private car ownership and private car use measured as the annual number of kilometers this model is a micro economic utility model in which the fixed and variable car costs enter through the budget restriction this allows us to do micro simulations of increasing those costs which is a policy issue in the netherlands it turns out that in this model both fixed and variable car costs are effective measures for reducing traffic growth the former working primarily through decreasing car ownership levels the latter having a more direct effect on car use

on the welfare cost of inflation and the recent behavior of money demand post 1980 u s data trace out a stable long run money demand relationship of cagan s semi log form between the m1 income ratio and the nominal interest rate with an interest semi elasticity of 1 79 integrating under this money demand curve yields estimates of the welfare cost of modest departures from friedman s zero nominal interest rate rule for the optimum quantity of money that are quite small the results suggest that the federal reserve s current policy which generates low but still positive rates of inflation provides an adequate approximation in welfare terms to the alternative of moving all the way to the friedman rule jel e31 e41 e52

intra household experiments a survey experiments with family groups are rare but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate this paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra household decision making i discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored while general themes from the research are still emerging four results repeatedly occur 1 the absence of efficiency in intra household decisions 2 joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions 3 individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and 4 deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision making

time saving innovations time allocation and energy use evidence from canadian households abstract time and energy are major inputs into the production of household goods and services as a result the market penetration of time saving technologies for general household use is expected to affect both a household s i allocation of time across home production and leisure activities and ii energy use for example with a household s adoption of a microwave or a dishwasher cooking food and washing dishes will require less time and therefore in home meal preparation may increase households with microwaves or dishwashers may also opt to spend more time undertaking other production activities inside or outside the home or engage in more leisure watching tv reading exercising to the extent that time is reallocated from less to more energy intensive activities in the home residential energy use will increase as households adopt appliances that embody time saving technology furthermore an adoption of time saving technologies for basic household chores such as meal preparation and laundry can impact energy use due to the fact that many time saving technologies are more energy intensive than alternative technologies that require larger time commitments in this paper we use the canadian survey of household energy use data from 2003 to examine the extent to which ownership of products that embody time saving innovations affects time allocation and energy use at the household level

unconventional fiscal policy at the zero bound when the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus we show that in the standard new keynesian model tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time consistent manner there is no need to use inecient policies such as

the effects of a money financed fiscal stimulus abstract i analyze the effects of a money financed fiscal stimulus and compare them with those resulting from a conventional debt financed stimulus i study the effects of both a tax cut and an increase in government purchases with and without a binding zero lower bound zlb on the nominal interest rate when the zlb is not binding a money financed fiscal stimulus is shown to have much larger multipliers than a debt financed fiscal stimulus that difference in effectiveness persists but is much smaller under a binding zlb nominal rigidities are shown to play a major role in shaping those effects

oil supply disruptions and modelling methodologies the role of lp models abstract this paper has three main objectives first an argument is made that oil vulnerability is not a problem of the past but remains a significant concern for all oil consuming countries especially beyond 1990 second it is suggested that the severity of past disruptions can be attributed in part to physical and institutional constraints that prevented the oil market from reacting quickly to what were relatively minor supply disruptions the currently changing structure of the world oil market in particular the evolving sales agreements under which an increasing percentage of world oil is traded and the vertical integration of major opec members into areas such as refining could decrease the ability of the market to adjust to future disruptions third it is suggested that linear programming lp models offer unique capabilities in assessing the degree to which the world and domestic oil markets could adjust to short term supply disruptions given constraints on transport trade and refining possibilities imposed by the physical structures of those market sectors or by control of those sectors by increasingly powerful producing countries the assessment of this flexibility will help pinpoint areas needing attention and also contribute indirectly to the evaluation of short run demand elasticities for world oil the us department of energy s petroleum allocation pal model is used as an example of one lp model that can address such issues

environmentally sustainable household consumption from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action unsustainable consumption patterns of the north or rather of the global affluent consumers class have been identified by agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development however neither accounting based on the system of national accounts sna nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making eco efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households as an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions the methodology is used twice once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster the latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators a rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

a quantile approach to assess the effectiveness of the subsidy policy for energy efficient home appliances evidence from rizhao china abstract a one year subsidy program for energy efficient home appliances has been implemented in china we construct a dataset consisting of participant and non participant households in both urban and rural areas of rizhao city by applying a quantile regression and counterfactual analysis this study disentangles the impact of this subsidy program and inherent household attributes on per capita residential electricity consumption first contrary to the mean regression the elasticity of electricity consumption to household s income age education and energy saving awareness varies markedly across the electricity consumption distribution and shows discrepancy between urban and rural areas second while inherent household attributes are identified as a primary determinant to the changes in residential electricity consumption the effect induced by the subsidy incentive is more significant at the middle of the electricity consumption distribution than at the tails third there are significant rebound effects that lead to overall increase in household electricity consumption our results suggest that the disparity between urban and rural regions and targeted consumer behavior changes should be taken into account to ensure the effectiveness of a future energy efficient subsidy program

spousal control and intra household decision making an experimental study in the philippines i elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the philippines when choices are private men put money into their personal accounts when choices are observable men commit money to consumption for their own benefit when required to communicate men put money into their wives account these strong treatment effects on men but not women appear related more to control than to gender men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treat ment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender specific outcomes

understanding the energy gdp elasticity a sectoral approach abstract this paper uses per capita data for 132 countries over 1960 2010 to estimate elasticities of sectoral energy use with respect to national gross domestic product gdp we estimate models in both levels and growth rates and use our estimates to sectorally decompose the aggregate energy gdp elasticity our estimates show that residential energy use is very inelastic to gdp if primary solid biofuels are counted in energy use tallies especially at low income levels residential use of electricity is more tightly linked to gdp as is energy use by the transportation industrial and services sectors agriculture typically accounts for a small share of energy use and has a modest energy gdp elasticity the aggregate energy gdp elasticity tends to be higher for countries at higher income levels in large part because traditional use of primary solid biofuels is less important gasoline prices winter temperature population and land area are among other factors influencing sectoral energy use

optimal monetary policy at the zero interest rate bound what should a central bank do when faced with a weak aggregate demand even after reducing the short term nominal interest rate to zero to address this question we solve a central bank s intertemporal loss minimization problem in which the non negativity constraint on nominal interest rates is explicitly considered we find that the optimal path is characterized by policy inertia in the sense that a zero interest rate policy should be continued for a while even after the natural rate of interest returns to a positive level by making such a commitment the central bank is able to achieve higher expected inflation lower long term nominal interest rates and a weaker domestic currency in the adverse periods when the natural rate of interest significantly deviates from a steady state level

on the stability of money demand abstract we show that regulatory changes that occurred in the banking sector in the early 1980s that considerably weakened regulation q can explain the apparent instability of money demand starting in the same period we evaluate the effects of the regulatory changes using a model that goes beyond aggregates as m1 and treats currency and different deposit types as alternative means of payments we use the model to construct a new monetary aggregate that performs remarkably well for all the period 1915 2012

energy output ratios and sectoral energy use the case of southeast asian countries abstract the relation between energy consumption and output is studied for six developing economies in southeast asia the changing structure of energy demands by consuming sectors and the effects of this on energy output ratios are analysed it is found that the commercial energy output ratio increased for most of the period between 1960 and 1982 the five factors responsible for the increasing ratio of commercial energy to output ratio were the rising share of industrial output in gdp the substitution of commercial for non commercial fuels the strong demand for transportation energy use the rise in electricity demand in the household commercial sector and the expansion of the energy conversion industries there were systematic variations in the composition of energy uses by sectors both over time and across countries the basic features observed at a sectoral level also support the validity of the five factors mentioned above

energy use and appliance ownership in ireland abstract this paper examines household energy use and appliance ownership in ireland logit regression analyses on a large micro dataset reveal how household characteristics can help explain the ownership of energy using appliances using ols regression models we explore the factors affecting residential energy demand conditional on appliance ownership results suggest that the methods of space and water heating employed by a household are even more important than electrical appliances in explaining domestic energy usage however the stock of appliances must be included in such models so that results will not be biased the methods employed in this paper can be easily adopted for studies of household energy use in other countries where household expenditure survey data are available

is there a fiscal free lunch in a liquidity trap this paper uses a dsge model to examine the eects of an expansion in government spending in a liquidity trap the spending multiplier can be much larger than in the normal situation if the liquidity trap is very persistent and scal stimulus can be rapidly implemented moreover the budgetary costs may be minimal as the large response of output boosts tax revenues allowing for something close to a scal free lunch however we caution that the multiplier may be much smaller under plausible implementation lags for many types of public spending and or if the liquidity trap lasts less than two years in addition because the marginal impact of scal expansion decreases in the scale of the outlay it is crucial to distinguish between average and marginal multipliers

on inflation and output with costly price changes a simple unifying result this paper determines the real effects of credible disinflation when price setting is staggered the results are surprising a fairly quick disinflation causes a boom this finding suggests that nominal price rigidity alone does not explain why disinflation is costly in actual economies this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

money demand function estimation by nonlinear cointegration conventionally the money demand function is estimated using a regression of the logarithm of money demand on either the interest rate or the logarithm of the interest rate this equation is presumed to be a cointegrating regression in this paper we aim to combine the logarithmic specification which models the liquidity trap better than a linear model with the assumption that the interest rate itself is an integrated process the proposed technique is robust to serial correlation in the errors for the usa our new technique results in larger coefficient estimates than previous research suggested and produces superior out of sample prediction copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

oil trends and prices in the next decade an aggregate analysis abstract in 1973 the oecd required about 0 5 tonnes of oil for the production of 1000 of output ten years after in 1983 for the production of output the requirements for oil had dropped to slightly over 0 3 tonnes this dramatic decline in the oil intensity of the oecd economy has led to a new era of oil oversupply marked by soft oil prices and uncertainty about the future market for petroleum products

a cross sectional analysis of energy output correlation abstract the nature of the correlation between energy consumption and output is examined based on cross sectional data for 100 countries the bias in the correlation due to the use of nominal income and to the convention adopted in measuring non commercial energy consumption is analysed it is found that when real income is used and non commercial energy consumption measured in commercial energy replacement value the cross sectional energy elasticity increases rapidly from about unity for the low income developing countries to between 1 6 and 1 8 for the high income developing countries and declines marginally thereafter in the industrial country income range the results show certain disparity on energy output ratio across countries with higher income countries consuming disproportionately more energy per unit of real output

representing in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in beijing abstract it is expected that in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in a household might be correlated with each other probably due to the existence of household budget constraints ownership and usage of energy saving technologies for in home appliances or vehicles might lead to the increase in out of home or in home energy consumption it is therefore necessary to jointly represent in home and out of home energy consumption in the same modeling framework with this consideration we first build a new type of energy consumption model based on the multiple discrete continuous extreme value mdcev modeling framework next we conducted a questionnaire survey in beijing in 2009 and successfully collected the information about households energy consumption ownership usage of in home appliances and vehicles and households and their members attributes from 1014 households throughout an empirical analysis it is confirmed that the mdcev model is effective to simultaneously describe the in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in addition it is revealed that a set of household and personal attributes affect the ownership and usage of in home appliances and vehicles furthermore it is shown that the unobserved factors play a much more important role in explaining energy consumption behavior than the observed attributes of households and their members

distributional effects of alternative vehicle pollution control policies abstract previous work shows that policies that subsidize new vehicles and tax size miles or gasoline efficiently reduce pollution less is known about their distributional effects this paper examines distributional effects by estimating the joint demand for vehicles and miles using the consumer expenditure survey greater price responsiveness among low income households enhances progressivity of gas or miles taxes across lower incomes and mitigates regressivity across upper incomes taxes on engine size or subsidies to new vehicles are significantly more regressive than gas or miles taxes

is ignorance bliss the effect of asymmetric information between spouses on intra household allocations fundamental questions about how resources are allocated within the family remain unresolved because family decision making is a repeated game and there is caring it is generally posited that the marriage relationship exploits the high degree of information sharing between spouses even if official cash transfers themselves are common knowledge between household members the transfer may loosen constraints over other income sources less easily monitored empirical research has documented inefficient allocations between spouses and non cooperative behavior as a result of asymmetric information in migrant households however the implications of asymmetric information between cohabiting spouses are still relatively unexplored in this paper the authors used data from a field experiment in southern ghana to test the effect of windfalls on intra household allocation the results from the experiment indicate that spouses behave according to a non cooperative marital allocation contract with differences in spending patterns by gender