Below you will find links to some of my recent research projects. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions.
Working Papers:
Overcoming the Barriers to the Market Performance of Green Consumer Goods (job market paper)
Environmentally-friendly (“green”) products face a unique set of barriers in their pursuit of increased market share. I develop a dynamic model of observational learning and costly search in which a green consumer good enters a market to challenge an established “dirty” good. In this model, purchase decisions depend on such factors as the price and quality differences between the green and dirty products, consumers’ willingness-to-pay to protect the environment, and the cost of obtaining information about new products instead of relying on public perception alone. Using both theoretical analyses and model simulations, I solve for the long-term market performance of the green good in terms of its probability of success and market share. Conditions are provided for when it is socially optimal to use public policy to encourage green purchases. Then, comparative statics predict the effectiveness of various tools used to improve market performance, with a particular focus on when to use financial incentives and informational campaigns. Finally, the model provides explanations for why efforts to encourage the market performance of energy-efficient light bulbs failed in the U.S. residential market in the 1990s, and why an empirical analysis suggests that informational campaigns have been particularly successful in recent years.
We analyze the evaluations of California energy-efficiency programs to assess the effectiveness of these evaluations in: 1) improving our understanding of their performance and 2) providing a check on utility incentives to overstate energy savings. We find that third-party evaluations are useful tools to achieve both ends because the programs largely did not meet their energy-savings projections, and the utility-reported savings estimates are systematically higher than the evaluated savings estimates. We also find evidence that the choice of the third-party evaluator was influential in determining the estimate of evaluated savings.
The Bias of Integrated Assessment Models that Ignore Climate Catastrophes (Working Paper)
Climate scientists currently predict there is a small but real possibility that climate change will lead to civilization threatening catastrophic events. Martin Weitzman has used this evidence along with his controversial “Dismal Theorem” to argue that integrated assessment models of climate change cannot be used to determine an optimal price for carbon dioxide. In this paper, I provide additional support for Weitzman’s conclusions by running numerical simulations to estimate risk premiums toward climate catastrophes. I incorporate into the model a more realistic range of uncertainty for both climate catastrophes and societal risk aversion compared with the assumptions found in most integrated assessment models. The resulting range of risk premiums indicates that the conclusions drawn from integrated assessment models that do not incorporate the potential for climate catastrophes are too imprecise to support any particular policy recommendation. The analysis of this paper is less technical than Weitzman’s, and therefore the conclusions should be accessible to a wider audience.
Working Papers in Progress:
The Market Performance of Green Consumer Goods with Uncertain Qualities and Costs
Optimal Targeted Abatement Spending to Avoid Climate Catastrophes
Multilateral Cooperation on the Long-term Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel (working paper)
Optimal Tax on Dirty Fuels in Developing Countries (Project Proposal)
Bilateral Climate Change Agreements among Heterogeneous Countries (Working Paper)
