Demand for Three Environmentally Friendly Goods: Plant Based Meat, Clean Air, and Efficient Light Bulbs

Chapter 1Meat and agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas releases, and beef is particularly emissions heavy. Plant-based meat (PBM) is billed as a new food that could overturn the beef market and eventually transition many meat eaters to a far more environmentally friendly option. Currently, we have very little information about how much meat is being substituted by PBM. This paper uses proprietary data from a nationwide grocery chain to create a very large sample of households who have bought PBM at least once. With this dataset, I am able to draw fine conclusions about what attributes are related to purchasing and repurchasing PBM. I find that buying and more importantly, rebuying PBM is associated with having previously bought less meat and more meat substitutes. In addition, the people entering the PBM market are no more likely to have bought meat than those who first started buying it, suggesting PBM is struggling to expand its reach to those who could most easily switch away from real meat. In addition, because of how promotional pricing is determined at this nationwide chain, I am able to run event study regressions to test the theory that PBM has is a robust substitute for beef in grocery stores. In these regressions, I find little evidence for switching between meat and PBM./nChapter 2(Co-authored with Scott Kaplan) This project leverages a unique setting to study the effects of air pollution on a market good people consume for recreational purposes: tickets to National Football League (NFL) games posted on a popular, online secondary marketplace. Our initial findings suggest that an increase in the AQI does not lead to a statistically significant change in listed ticket prices (in fact, we find a slightly positive estimate that is likely the effect of unaccounted for noise). We also determine that there was no statistically significant impact on the number of tickets listed on the marketplace for these games./nChapter 3 The so-called energy efficiency gap that describes how households apparently undervalue investments in energy efficient appliances and capital improvements has long vexed policy makers. In 2007, the US Congress attempted to help close this gap by establishing a 30\% efficiency mandate on all existing incandescent light bulbs. The aim of the law was to eliminate cheap, inefficient bulbs in favor of more expensive, highly efficient compact florescent lamps (CFLs) or yet to be produced more efficient halogen incandescent bulbs, but the ultimate effect of the mandate was unclear at the time it was passed. Using heterogeneity in the roll-out of the mandate between California and the rest of the country, I use a panel of light bulb sales data from a nationwide discount store retailer to examine the effects on the market the mandate had. I find that the mandate increased the price of incandescents (along with their efficiency) but had little effect on the demand for CFLs. When certain incandescents were made unavailable I find strong evidence that customers switched to different types of incandescents or, in some instances, reduced overall light bulb purchases. The mandates clearly incrementally increased the efficiency of light bulbs purchased, but did not switch the nation en-mass to high efficiency CFLs.

Advisor: Fowlie, Meredith