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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 ...
Working Paper
Consumption, Wealth, and Income Inequality: A Tale of Tails
We provide evidence that the distributions of consumption, labor income, wealth, and capital income exhibit asymptotic power-law behavior with a strict ranking of upper tail inequality, in that order, from the least to the most unequal. We show analytically and quantitatively that the canonical heterogeneous-agent model cannot replicate the proper ranking and magnitudes of these four tails simultaneously. Mechanisms addressing the wealth concentration puzzle in these models through return heterogeneity lead to a mirror consumption concentration puzzle. We match the cross-sectional data on ...