Research
Working Papers
Access to Alternatives: Increasing Rooftop Solar Adoption with Online Platforms (Updated Draft)
Residential solar installation prices, which are set on a case-by-case basis, remain both relatively high and variable despite significant declines in solar panel manufacturing costs. In this paper, I estimate a structural model of the solar installation market to quantify market power and to evaluate the welfare effects of connecting buyers and sellers through an online platform. I find that the platform yields a $1,451 increase in consumer surplus by increasing the number of installation bids each household receives. Households with higher energy consumption attract relatively more bids and reap the largest benefits from the platform. Counterfactual simulations yield two main results: 1) an increase from one to five bids per project causes a 15.5% ($4,000) reduction in gross installation prices and a 33% increase in the number of solar installations, and 2) the solar Investment Tax Credit—which is scheduled to be eliminated in 2022—improves total welfare by mitigating market power in addition to reducing pollution externalities from electricity generation.
Soaking Up the Sun: Battery Investment, Renewable Energy, and Market Equilibrium with Andrew Butters and Gautam Gowrisankaran
Battery storage offers a potentially valuable complement to renewable energy. Recognizing this, policymakers have recently incentivized and mandated storage as a means to integrate renewable energy and meet climate goals. This paper evaluates the equilibrium value and adoption trajectory of utility-scale batteries using California data, focusing on the impact of falling battery capital costs, complementarities with renewable energy, and market power. We add three key modeling features relative to the literature: (1) modeling of equilibrium effects from large-scale batteries that includes ramping constraints, (2) a frontier time-series model of electricity load and marginal costs, and (3) linked competitive dynamic equilibrium models of battery adoption and operations. We find that: (1) the value of battery storage increased sharply between 2016-19 as solar generation increased, (2) battery investment exhibits decreasing returns-to-scale---the per-unit value of batteries drops significantly with total installed battery capacity, (3) battery operations increase California's 2018 expected discounted social surplus from the electricity market by $3.8 billion or $2.42 per MWh of solar energy generated, and (4) California would require a 35% subsidy on batteries to meet its 2024 storage mandate of 1.3 GW of power capacity.
Things Remembered: How Drivers Collect and Use Gas Price Information (Available on Request) with Ashley Langer and Shaun Mcrae
From coffee to gasoline, consumers often make recurring purchases without having complete information about current characteristics or how characteristics may have changed since the last time they purchased. In this paper, we use geospatial data on drivers’ travel paths and gasoline purchasing behavior to understand how drivers choose where to stop to purchase gas and to understand driver information acquisition and use. We find that consumers appear to have incomplete information about the set of stations available and the prices that those stations charge. Drivers are more sensitive to prices at stations they have passed before or that are directly on their current route. Perfect information would increase consumer surplus by 6 cents per gallon purchased, but drivers would largely use this information to find better brands or stations that are closer to their routes rather than stations that are less expensive overall. Even conditioning on current prices, drivers use out-of-date or “stale” information on station prices when choosing where to stop. We show that drivers become more price-sensitive when the prices they observe are increasing, suggesting that drivers are loss averse. In ongoing work, we show suggestive evidence that drivers increase their reliance on stale prices when the prices the observe are increasing, which increases their overall price sensitivity particularly for stations farther from their quickest route.
Publications
Waiting for the Courts: Effects of Policy Uncertainty on Pollution and Investment Environmental & Resource Economics, 2019
Legal challenges and transitions of political power cause the future of regulatory policies to be uncertain. In this article, I investigate how uncertainty about environmental policy affects investment and emissions at coal-fired power plants. I exploit a legal challenge to the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) that created variation in the probability that individual plants would need to comply with the new policy. I use a difference-in-differences approach to compare pollution reductions at power plants located in states subject to more uncertainty to plants in states that that were not. I find that plants with a lower probability of being regulated invested in fewer capital-intensive pollution controls and reduced pollution by 13% less on average. Many of these plants did switch to capital-intensive pollution controls after the court upheld CAIR. Policy uncertainty increased compliance costs by $124 million by delaying efficient investments.