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Working Paper
The Welfare Costs of Misaligned Incentives: Energy Inefficiency and the Principal-Agent Problem
In many settings, misaligned incentives and inadequate monitoring lead employees to take self-interested actions contrary to their employer's wishes, giving rise to the classic principal-agent problem. In this paper, I identify and quantify the costs of misaligned incentives in the context of an energy efficiency appliance replacement program. I show that contractors (agents) hired by the electric utility (the principal) increase their compensation by intentionally misreporting program data to deliberately authorize replacement of non-qualified refrigerators. I provide empirical estimates of ...
Discussion Paper
Electricity Demand as a High-Frequency Economic Indicator: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Hurricane Harvey
Electricity is used by all businesses in the United States. During quickly moving economic shocks—for example, a pandemic or natural disaster—changes in electricity consumption can provide insight to policymakers before traditional survey-based metrics, which can lag weeks or months behind economic conditions and typically only show a snapshot of when the survey was conducted.
Working Paper
The Canary in the Coal Decline: Appalachian Household Finance and the Transition from Fossil Fuels
The energy transition away from fossil fuels presents significant transition risks for communities historically built around the fossil fuel industry. This paper uses the decline in the Appalachian coal industry between 2011 and 2018 to understand how individuals are harmed by a reduction in local fossil fuel extraction activity. We use individual-level credit data and exogenous variation in coal demand from the electricity sector to identify how the coal mining industry’s decline affected the finances of Appalachian households. We find that the decline in demand for coal caused broad-based ...