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Publications
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- October 2023
- Article
Product Variety, the Cost of Living, and Welfare Across Countries
By: Alberto Cavallo, Robert C. Feenstra and Robert Inklaar
We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living is inferred...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Residential Battery Storage - Reshaping The Way We Do Electricity
By: Christian Kaps and Serguei Netessine
In this paper, we aim to understand when private households invest in rooftop solar installations and battery storage, and how these investment decisions affect their electricity usage patterns as well as the market structure overall. We answer three main research...
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- July 2023
- Article
Impacts of Electricity Quality Improvements: Experimental Evidence on Infrastructure Investments
By: Robyn C. Meeks, Arstan Omuraliev, Ruslan Isaev and Zhenxuan Wang
Hundreds of millions of households depend on electricity grid connections providing low quality and unreliable services. Understanding the impacts of and consumer response to electricity quality improvements is important for development and the environment. We...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
The Effects of Cryptocurrency Wealth on Household Consumption and Investment
By: Darren Aiello, Scott R. Baker, Tetyana Balyuk, Marco Di Maggio, Mark J. Johnson and Jason Kotter
This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Credit and the Family: The Economic Consequences of Closing the Credit Gap of U.S. Couples
By: Olivia S. Kim
Closing disparities in credit access between spouses can help reduce consumption inequality in the household. The 2013 reversal of the Truth-in-Lending Act increased the borrowing capacity of secondary earners in equitable-distribution states but not in...
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- December 2022
- Case
Taylor Farms: Adding Value to Fresh Produce
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest L. Reinhardt, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Pedro Levindo
In October 2022, Bruce Taylor (HBS MBA, 1981), Chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, the leading producer of salads and healthy fresh foods in the United States, wondered whether this was the right time for Taylor Farms to venture into the Controlled Environment...
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- December 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Cann: High Hopes for Cannabis Infused Beverages
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne V. Wilson
Founded in 2018 by Jake Bullock and Luke Anderson, Cann sold “social tonics,” or cannabis-infused beverages. By 2022, the company had several notable celebrity investors and talent partners, had sold over 10 million beverages to consumers, was distributing in six...
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Keywords:
Stigma;
Product Innovation;
Product Introduction;
Product Differentiation;
New Products;
New Product Marketing;
New Product Management;
Brand Management;
Branding;
Packaging;
Positioning;
Growth Strategy And Execution;
Growth;
Cannabis Industry;
Purpose;
Purpose Brands;
LGBTQ;
Direct-to-consumer;
DTC;
Regulations;
Channels Of Distribution;
Product Development;
Product Marketing;
Product Positioning;
Product;
Innovation and Invention;
Brands and Branding;
Marketing;
Marketing Communications;
Marketing Channels;
Advertising;
Advertising Campaigns;
Digital Marketing;
Market Entry and Exit;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Consumer Products Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry;
United States;
Canada;
North America
- July 2022
- Article
The Pass-Through of Uncertainty Shocks to Households
By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani, Rodney Ramcharan, Vincent Yao and Edison Yu
Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. An increase in firm-level...
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Keywords:
Employment Risk;
Consumption;
Employment;
Risk and Uncertainty;
System Shocks;
Insurance;
Household;
Spending
- Article
Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption
By: Kyle Coombs, Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu and Michael Stepner
In June 2021, 22 states ended all supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, eliminating benefits entirely for over 2 million workers and reducing benefits by $300 per week for over 1 million workers. Using anonymous bank transaction data and a...
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- March 2022
- Case
Unilever: Remote Work in Manufacturing
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Susie L. Ma
In December 2021, Unilever—one of the world’s largest producers of consumer goods—was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
E-commerce During COVID: Stylized Facts from 47 Economies
By: Joel Alcedo, Alberto Cavallo, Bricklin Dwyer, Prachi Mishra and Antonio Spilimbergo
We study e-commerce across 47 economies and 26 industries during the COVID-19 pandemic using aggregated and anonymized transaction-level data from Mastercard, scaled to represent total consumer spending. The share of online transactions in total consumption increased...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Luxury Tourism and Environmentalism
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter examines the evolution of luxury tourism and its environmental impact. Whilst mass tourism is widely seen as environmentally damaging, the impact of luxury tourism is nuanced. During the first stage of the growth in the nineteenth century, the numbers of...
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- November 2021
- Article
A Salient Sugar Tax Decreases Sugary Drink Buying
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Paige Guge, Ryan Howell and Leslie John
Many governments have introduced sugary drink excise taxes to reduce purchasing and consumption of such drinks; however, they do not typically stipulate how such taxes should be communicated at point-of-purchase. Historical, field, and experimental data entailing over...
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Keywords:
Decision-making;
Open Data;
Open Materials;
Preregistered;
Health;
Policy;
Taxation;
Consumer Behavior;
Decision Making
- 2021
- Working Paper
Friends and Family Money: P2P Transfers and Financially Fragile Consumers
By: Tetyana Balyuk and Emily Williams
We assess the impact that real time money transfer technology has on consumer outcomes, particularly during periods of financial fragility. We do this by developing a new data set that documents use of Zelle—the most widely used P2P money transfer technology in the...
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- July 2021
- Article
Energy Efficiency and Electricity Reliability
By: Eliana Carranza and Robyn C. Meeks
Overloaded electrical systems are a major source of unreliable power. Using a randomized saturation design, we estimate the impact of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) on electricity reliability and household electricity consumption in the Kyrgyz Republic. Greater...
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- April 2021
- Case
Coca-Cola: Preparing for the Next 100 Years
By: Cynthia A. Montgomery and James Weber
In early 2020, James Quincey, the 14th chair of the 133-year old The Coca-Cola Company, was in the midst of a years-long transformation of Coca-Cola from being the leading carbonated soft drink (CSD) beverage company into a total beverage company. The company’s...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Housing Consumption and the Cost of Remote Work
By: Christopher Stanton and Pratyush Tiwari
This paper estimates housing choice differences between households with and without remote workers. Prior to the pandemic, the expenditure share on housing was more than seven percent higher for remote households compared to similar non-remote households in the same...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in...
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- January 2021
- Article
A Model of Relative Thinking
By: Benjamin Bushong, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein
Fixed differences loom smaller when compared to large differences. We propose a model of relative thinking where a person weighs a given change along a consumption dimension by less when it is compared to bigger changes along that dimension. In deterministic settings,...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Learning from People Like Me: The Impact of Demographic Diversity on Invisible Knowledge Consumption and Performance in Online Knowledge Exchange Platforms
By: Laura R. Huber, Jacqueline N. Lane, Haylee Ham and Karim R. Lakhani
The proliferation of online knowledge-sharing and online learning platforms with broad accessibility to participants across the globe has instigated a shift in how people acquire knowledge and new skills. These platforms bring together a demographically diverse pool of...
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