Abstract: In this paper, we examine the relative influence of individual decisions on joint household decisions, and whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient than individual choices in households. We find that both spouses have a significant influence on joint decisions, whereas husbands on average have a stronger influence than wives. Moreover, we find a substantial share of choice shifts from individual to joint household decisions, i.e. joint decisions are either more patient or more impatient than both individual choices.

We investigate the effect of remittances from migrated family members on informal inter-household transfers, an issue that has received limited attention in the literature. Using rich panel data from urban Ethiopia, we show that receiving international remittances increases the value of private domestic inter-household transfers, whereas receiving domestic remittances does not have any e ect.

Understanding unethical behavior is essential to many phenomena in the real world. The vast majority of existing studies have relied on stated behavior in surveys and some on incentivized experiments in the laboratory. In this paper, we carry out a field experiment in a unique setting. A survey more than one year before the field experiment allows us to compare stated unethical behavior with revealed behavior in the same situation. Our results indicate a strong discrepancy between stated and revealed behavior.

Abstract: We analyze a typical principal-agent relationship in the context of international climate policy, in which the principals of two countries first decide whether to merge their domestic emission permit markets to form an international market. In the second stage, they delegate the decision on domestic permit supply to an agent. We find that principals have an incentive to select agents who care less for environmental damages than they do themselves.

We investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity. On average, water use decreased by 6 percent for a treatment group for whom we conducted a social information campaign on their use of water, compared with that of a control group. We identify a spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign. The effect is sizeable; this group has almost 9 percent lower use of electricity after the campaign compared with the control group.

This paper investigates direct and spillover effects of a social information campaign aimed at encouraging residential water savings in Colombia. The campaign was organized as a randomized field experiment, consisting of monthly delivery of consumption reports, including normative messages, for one year. Results indicate that social information and appeals to norm-based behavior reduce water use by up to 6.8 percent in households directly targeted by the campaign.