Using British data on over 7 million residential property sales, we find that the simplified energy efficiency ( EE ) information leads to important market effects. UK legislation requires the use of an energy label that shows an EE rating score ( 1-100 ) mapped into arbitrary color-coded rating bands ( A-G). Applying a regression discontinuity design, we document significant price discontinuities at rating band thresholds, indicating heuristic thinking in the market. These price discontinuities influence market behavior as sellers are more likely to make EE investments if their property is just below a threshold. We discuss policy considerations and avenues for future research. ( JEL D91, K32, Q48, R31)

We explore whether maternal lead exposure affects birthweights and child mortality in a setting where average blood lead levels were extremely high. We analyse two drinking water interventions in Scotland that reduced lead levels in Glasgow and Edinburgh from 1978 onwards. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design we examine administrative data of over 650,000 births between 1975 and 2000. We do not find consistent evidence of any effect leading to an increase in birthweights or a reduction in under-5 mortality. We estimate minimal detectable effects and can rule out even very low changes in birthweight, but we cannot rule out 1–3 deaths prevented per thousand due to the treatments. As our focus is on short-run outcomes around the time of birth, these findings do not rule out the possibility of longer-term impacts from early-life lead exposure. We also suggest our findings indicate future research should further explore the mediating pathways between lead and health outcomes.

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We exploit the introduction of interstate banking deregulation across the U.S. to study the relationship between credit constraints and consumption of durables and energy use. Using the American Housing Survey, we link the timing of these reforms with evidence of a credit expansion and household responses on many margins. We find evidence that low-income households are more likely to purchase new appliances after the deregulation; however, this did not increase energy consumption. The results are informative for policymakers who would like households to purchase new durable goods that use less energy.

Does lead pollution increase crime? We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime, pooling 542 estimates from 24 studies. The effect of lead is overstated in the literature due to publication bias. Our main estimates of the mean effect sizes are a partial correlation of 0.16, and an elasticity of 0.09. Our estimates suggest the abatement of lead pollution may be responsible for 7–28% of the fall in homicide in the US. Given the historically higher urban lead levels, reduced lead pollution accounted for 6–20% of the convergence in US urban and rural crime rates. Lead increases crime, but does not explain the majority of the fall in crime observed in some countries in the 20th century. Additional explanations are needed.

C redit risk can be an impediment to new auto purchases, especially for electric vehicles. This paper looks at the elimination of auto loan cramdowns for Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings, where the loan value is made equal to the auto value, on three outcomes: auto value, likelihood of new auto, and loan-to-value ratio of new autos. Using a difference-in-difference approach based on a state’s historical use of Chapter 13 bankruptcy, we show that household’s secure better loan-to-value ratios and acquire higher valued autos due to lower credit risk following the reform. Black households are more likely to have a new car while low-asset households have worse loan-to-value ratios then the average. Together, these results indicate that lower risk to auto lenders can facilitate new electric vehicles purchases. nearly doubling in magnitude relative to our full sample estimates. These findings suggest that Chapter 13 bankruptcy reform helped increase auto credit availability to these subgroups. can be viewed as a form of a triple-difference-in-differences model, comparing changes around the legislative reform on car-related assets between separate subgroups relative to the full sample. In this way, our results allow us to identify potential differential effects encumbered by these demographics through an auto loan channel. birth

Retrofitting—replacing obsolete home infrastructure with more energy-efficient substitutes—will be essential to reducing energy use and carbon emissions in the future. Yet European and American households have proved reluctant to undertake these changes. Evidence has shown that a home energy audit can motivate people to retrofit their homes. In this article, we show that including the EU energy label—which displays the property's energy-efficiency rating—in energy audit reports is a simple way to enhance the audit's effectiveness: When energy labels are required as part of the process of selling a property, home sellers become motivated to retrofit if doing so boosts their property into a higher efficiency category on the label. Drawing on insights from the behavioral science literature, we offer suggestions for how policymakers can leverage this motivation to expand household investments in retrofitting. Although our proposals focus on retrofitting, some of them could also encourage other actions that would reduce energy consumption.

This paper uses a range of exogenous schooling reforms in the UK to explore the relationship between education and a range of financial behaviours. Initially, we exploit two compulsory schooling reforms in Britain (1947 and 1972) and employ a regression discontinuity design to analyse nationally representative data. We find limited evidence that one extra year of schooling led to systematically different financial behaviours. One exception is the promotion of more positive saving behaviours amongst females affected by the 1947 reform. We then go on to explore a large expansion of the higher education sector in the UK, which occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, and confirm that general education does not appear to affect financial behaviours systematically. We argue that, despite clear positive spill-overs of educational reforms, desirable financial behaviours require specific and targeted education policies and we point to the growing research in this field to support this conclusion. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We present new evidence showing that fiscal austerity strengthens support for redistribution, especially for the relatively well-off. Our theoretical model proposes two mechanisms to explain this heterogeneity in support for redistribution: ‘altruism’ and ‘appreciation’. We test our theoretical model’s predictions by matching attitudes reported in the British Social Attitudes Survey with local area-level spending cuts in England over the period 2010 to 2015. We exploit the spatial and temporal variation in spending cuts at the Local Authority level to compute a plausibly exogenous measure of the austerity shock. We find evidence for these two channels.

We examine the linkages between fiscal austerity and life satisfaction across twelve European countries using a sample of repeated cross-sections of individuals from 1999 to 2014.Austerity policies may trigger several responses at both the macro and micro-level, which in turn may affect life satisfaction directly or indirectly.We employ mediation analysis to account for these complex relationships linking austerity to an individual's life satisfaction, their economic expectations and their likelihood of unemployment.We find that austerity policies primarily affect individual life satisfaction via the economic expectations channel.Austerity dampens optimism about the future and this response has a negative effect on life satisfaction across a range of measures of economic expectations.In addition, our results suggest that changes in government expenditure, as opposed to taxation, matter for life satisfaction.

We compare the probabilities of selective (grammar) school entry in England and Wales before and after the 1944 Education Act. The Act had direct and indirect influences on the costs of grammar education and on entry-exam coverage, design and marking methodology. Post-1944, grammar school entry among children born in the middle of the school year improved considerably. We argue that age-adjusted group standardized testing was an important contributory factor. The youngest pupils remained significantly disadvantaged. We produce evidence that this is consistent with the practice of streaming (tracking) junior school children at age 7 into classes delineated by average ability.

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While much is known regarding the effects of immigration for objective outcomes, relatively little is known regarding the effects for perceived well-being. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in the net-inflows of foreign-born individuals across local areas in England, we examine the relationship between immigration and natives’ subjective well-being as captured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). We find small negative effects overall but that an analysis of the main effects masks significant differences across subgroups, with relatively older individuals, those with below-average household incomes, the unemployed and finally those without any formal educational qualifications experiencing much more substantive well-being losses than others. These observed well-being differentials are congruent with voting patterns evident in the recent UK referendum on EU membership. We put forward perceived as opposed to actual labour market competition and social identity as two potential explanations for the negative well-being impacts of immigration for natives.

Background: The Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) is a non-NHS population-level policy intervention that aims to reduce cold exposure and enhance the health and well-being of older adults. Labelling this cash transfer as ‘winter fuel’ has been shown to lead to increased household energy expenditure, but it is not known if this expenditure produces warmer homes or health benefits. Objectives: First, the association between indoor temperature and health was established to identify the outcome measures most likely to be affected by the WFP. Then, whether or not receiving the WFP is associated with raised household temperature levels and/or improved health was assessed. Design: Random and fixed effects regression models were used to estimate the link between ambient indoor temperature and health. A regression discontinuity (RD) design analysis exploiting the sharp eligibility criteria for the WFP was employed to estimate the potential impact of the payment. Setting: The sample was drawn from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), an observational study of community-dwelling individuals aged ≥ 50 years in England. Participants: Analyses examining the association between household temperature and health had a maximum sample of 12,210 adults aged 50–90 years. The RD analyses drew on a maximum of 5902 observations. Intervention: The WFP provides households with a member who is aged > 60 years (up to 2010, from which point the minimum age increased) in the qualifying week with a lump sum annual payment, typically in November or December. Main outcome measures: Differences in indoor temperature were examined, and, following an extensive literature review of relevant participant-reported health indicators and objectively recorded biomarkers likely to be affected by indoor temperature, a series of key measures were selected: blood pressure, inflammation, lung function, the presence of chest infections, subjective health and depressive symptom ratings. Data sources: The first six waves of the ELSA were drawn from, accessible through the UK Data Service (SN:5050 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing: Waves 0–7, 1998–2015). Results: Results from both random and fixed-effects multilevel regression models showed that low levels of indoor temperature were associated with raised systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels and raised fibrinogen levels. However, across the RD models, no evidence was found that the WFP was consistently associated with differences in either household temperature or the health of qualifying (vs. non-qualifying) households. Limitations: The presence of small effects cannot be ruled out, not detectable because of the sample size in the current study. Conclusions: This study capitalised on the sharp assignment rules regarding WFP eligibility to estimate the potential effect of the WFP on household temperature and health in a national sample of English adults. The RD design employed did not identify evidence linking the WFP to warmer homes or potential health and well-being effects. Future work: Further research should utilise larger samples of participants close to the WFP eligibility cut-off point examined during particularly cold weather in order to identify whether or not the WFP is linked to health benefits not detected in the current study, which may have implications for population health and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the WFP. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Public Health Research programme.

This paper examines the impact of democratisation on tax structure in an agrarian economy where goods can be produced at home for self-consumption. We first develop a model of optimal taxation with heterogeneous agents where the good produced in the market is subject to a consumption tax, whereas the homogeneous good produced at home is burdened by a direct tax (such as land tithes). Contrary to conventional theory, our model suggests that extension of the voting franchise to poorer segments of the population exerts a negative impact on the share of direct to indirect taxes. Using unique national and regional tax data for the Kingdom of Greece - a typical agrarian economy when universal male suffrage was established in 1864 - we provide consistent empirical evidence. Greek governments adjusted tax policy in order to meet the preferences of the newly enfranchised electorate that constituted mostly by peasants and farmers. This group was harmed substantially by direct taxes on land but was able to avoid indirect taxes through self-consumption. We also employ a sample of 12 European countries over the same period and provide evidence for a similar change in the tax structure when the agricultural sector dominates the economy.

Recent evidence suggests that labeling of unconditional cash transfers leads recipients to spend more on the labeled good. In this paper we show that the Winter Fuel Payment, an unconditional cash transfer, has distortionary effects on the market for goods related to the labeled product, renewable technologies. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design this analysis finds a robust reduction in the probability to install renewable energy technologies of 1.2 percentage points. Falsification tests support the labeling hypothesis. As a result, households use too much energy from sources which generate pollution and too little from relatively cleaner technologies.

Much recent research suggests that immigration has had little, if any, negative impact on the labour market outcomes of natives. In this study we focus on ascertaining the effect of immigration on subjective as opposed to objective indicators of native well-being. Our analytical approach exploits spatial and temporal variation in the net inflows of foreign-born individuals across local areas in England. We find using both a fixed effects and instrumental variable specification that net inflows of foreign-born individuals are associated with modest negative subjective well-being effects for the population as a whole, but that there is a notable degree of heterogeneity in this relationship. Specifically, relatively older individuals (60 ), those with below average household incomes, the unemployed and finally those without any formal educational qualifications experience much more pronounced well-being losses than their younger, financially better-off and employed counterparts. These observed well-being differentials across social groups are similar to voting patterns evident in the recent UK referendum on EU membership. We put forward perceived labour market competition as one of the mechanisms underpinning these results. In support of this premise, we find that the negative relationship between inflows of foreign-born individuals and the subjective well-being of the native-born population in England is much more substantive when macroeconomic conditions are relatively less favourable.

Medical liability systems have been accused of increasing health expenditure insofar as they induce the practice of defensive medicine. Despite the large evidence on the role of medical malpractice liability, the identification of its causal effect on physicians’ treatment decisions is a difficult task. In this paper we study for the first time in a controlled laboratory setting the effect of introducing the risk of being sued for medical malpractice on the provision of physicians’ medical services. In our experimental sessions both medical and non-medical students choose how many medical services to provide for heterogeneous patients. We implement exogenous variations in the presence of medical malpractice liability and expected probability of being sued, and thus we exploit the within-subject variation in the provision of medical services to infer the causal effect of malpractice liability. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of malpractice liability under different physicians’ payment methods, which allows us to discuss the interplay between medical liability and payment systems. Our behavioral data show that introducing malpractice liability pressure does lead physicians to choose a higher amount of medical services, regardless of the physicians’ payment system. However, we also find that the payment system in which malpractice liability is implemented makes the difference under the societal perspective, with relevant implications for health policy.