scholarly journals The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation

2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (10) ◽  
pp. 3003-3037 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunt Allcott ◽  
Todd Rogers

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency “action and backsliding,” but these cycles attenuate over time. Second, if reports are discontinued after two years, effects are relatively persistent, decaying at 10–20 percent per year. Third, consumers are slow to habituate: they continue to respond to repeated treatment even after two years. We show that the previous conservative assumptions about post-intervention persistence had dramatically understated cost effectiveness and illustrate how empirical estimates can optimize program design.(JEL D12, D83, L94, Q41)

2021 ◽  
pp. 109442812199322
Author(s):  
Ali Shamsollahi ◽  
Michael J. Zyphur ◽  
Ozlem Ozkok

Cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs) are common, but their applications often focus on “short-run” effects among temporally proximal observations. This addresses questions about how dynamic systems may immediately respond to interventions, but fails to show how systems evolve over longer timeframes. We explore three types of “long-run” effects in dynamic systems that extend recent work on “impulse responses,” which reflect potential long-run effects of one-time interventions. Going beyond these, we first treat evaluations of system (in)stability by testing for “permanent effects,” which are important because in unstable systems even a one-time intervention may have enduring effects. Second, we explore classic econometric long-run effects that show how dynamic systems may respond to interventions that are sustained over time. Third, we treat “accumulated responses” to model how systems may respond to repeated interventions over time. We illustrate tests of each long-run effect in a simulated dataset and we provide all materials online including user-friendly R code that automates estimating, testing, reporting, and plotting all effects (see https://doi.org/10.26188/13506861 ). We conclude by emphasizing the value of aligning specific longitudinal hypotheses with quantitative methods.


Economies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Derick Quintino ◽  
José Telo da Gama ◽  
Paulo Ferreira

Brazil is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of cattle, chicken and swine. Therefore, co-movements of Brazilian meat prices are important for both domestic and foreign stakeholders. We propose to analyse the cross-correlation between meat prices in Brazil, namely, cattle, swine and chicken, including also in the analysis information from some commodities, namely maize, soya beans, oil, and the Brazilian exchange rate. Our sample covers the recent period which coincided with extensive macroeconomic and institutional changes in Brazil, from 2011 to 2020, and is divided in two periods: (i) presidential pre-impeachment (P1), occurring in August 2016, and; (ii) post-impeachment (P2). Our results indicate that in P1, only the prices of swine and chicken showed a positive and strong correlation over time, and that cattle showed some positive correlation with chicken only in the short run. In P2, there was also a positive and consistent correlation between swine and chicken, and only a positive association with swine and cattle in the long run. For more spaced time scales (days), the changes in the degree of correlation were significant only in the long run for swine and cattle.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (7) ◽  
pp. 1850-1860 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide la Torre ◽  
Simone Marsiglio

We analyze the optimal debt reduction problem in an uncertainty context. The social planner has a finite horizon and seeks to minimize the social costs associated with debt repayment by taking into account not only the short-run costs of the policy, but also the long-run costs associated with the outstanding level of debt. We characterize the optimal policy and the dynamics of the debt-to-GDP ratio, showing that it will decrease over time if economic policy is effective enough. We characterize how the evolution of the debt-to-GDP ratio depends on the main parameters and we present a simple calibration based on Greek data to illustrate the implications of our analysis in real-world setups.


Author(s):  
Syeda Anam Fatima Rizvi

Resource availability matters the most in health care system-based outcomes. But health spending is highly unequal across the world and presents varying outcomes. This study aims to investigate the missing part that why some countries failed to have reasonable outcomes despite spending more than those countries that spend less. This study intends to include all those factors that are responsible for improving the cost-effectiveness of health expenditures. The study took two data sets, one from the developing countries and second of developed countries as per World Bank classification. As anticipated, there are significant differences in health per capita expenditures. Determinants were also found to behave differently both in the short run and long run as well as across the two data sets.


Author(s):  
Eddy M.M. Adang

Proven cost-effectiveness of innovative technologies is more and more a necessary condition for implementation in clinical practice. But proven cost-effectiveness itself does not guarantee successful implementation of an innovation. A reason for this could be the potential discrepancy between efficiency on the long run, on which cost-effectiveness is based, and efficiency on the short run. In economics, long run and short run efficiency are discussed in the context of economies of scale. This chapter addresses the usefulness of cost-effectiveness for decision making considering the potential discrepancy between long run and short run efficiency of innovative technologies in healthcare, the potential consequences for implementation in daily clinical practice, explores diseconomies of scale in Dutch hospitals, and makes suggestions for what strategies might help to overcome hurdles to implement innovations due to that short run-long run efficiency discrepancy.


Author(s):  
Peter Temin

I employ descriptive regressions of the price of each commodity over time to examine the long-and short-run variation in prices as a whole. The results of estimating equations in the text show that contemporaries could not have predicted future prices; descriptive regressions can tell later observers what actually happened. The first such regression evaluates the long-run trend of prices. It models the relationship between each commodity’s log price and the year, year squared, year cubed, and three dummy variables for different intervals:...


Author(s):  
Dov Cohen ◽  
Ivan Hernandez ◽  
Karl Gruschow ◽  
Andrzej Nowak ◽  
Michele J Gelfand ◽  
...  

A commitment to honor is a commitment to irrationality—at least in the short-run—because it involves defending one’s honor, regardless of stakes or cost. Yet, circumstances giving rise to honor cultures—lawless environments, portable (easy-to-steal) wealth—create milieus where people must appear tough to deter predators. Thus, what seems irrational in the short-run may be rational in the long-run. This chapter describes three agent-based models exploring when an honor stance is advantageous and examining population dynamics of strategies in the environment. Models track empirical observations well. Further, models highlight: how prosocial reciprocity (not just vengeance) is crucial for honor to thrive; how positive and negative reciprocity become correlated over time in honor cultures; the rise of a strategy opposite to honor and how honor and its opposite exist symbiotically; how evolution cannot be outsmarted but can be “outdumbed”; cycling of strategies’ popularity; and Child × Environment interactions producing drift.


2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Lambert ◽  
Jian Gong

Energy prices increased significantly following the first energy price shock of 1973. Agricultural producers found few short run substitution possibilities as relative factor prices changed. Inelastic demands resulted in total expenditures on energy inputs that have closely followed energy price changes over time. A dynamic cost function model is estimated to derive short and long run adjustments within U.S. agriculture between 1948 and 2002 to changes in relative input prices. The objective is to measure the degree of farm responsiveness to energy price changes and if this responsiveness has changed over time. Findings support inelastic demands for all farm inputs. Statistical results support moderate increases in responses to energy and other input price changes in the 1980s. However, demands for all inputs remain inelastic in both the short and long run. Estimation of share equations associated with a dynamic cost function indicates that factor adjustment to input price changes are essentially complete within 1 year.


Author(s):  
Matti Hovi ◽  
Jani-Petri Laamanen

Abstract We examine the roles of macro-level adaptation — including social comparison effects becoming more important over time — and macroeconomic loss aversion in the time-series relationship between national income and subjective well-being. Models allowing for these phenomena are applied to cross-country panel data. We find evidence for macroeconomic loss aversion that becomes more important over time: the effects of economic growth become small and statistically insignificant in the long run, whereas the effects of contractions are large and long-lasting. The results are consistent with the Easterlin paradox and point to it being explained by macro-level adaptation to economic growth. Our results highlight the importance of allowing for both dynamics to distinguish long-run from short-run effects and asymmetries to recognize the important effects of contractions. Failing to do the former leads to a misleading impression of the long-run relationship between economic growth and well-being.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (193) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Tamim Bayoumi ◽  
Jelle Barkema ◽  
Diego Cerdeiro

The rise of global supply chains has had profound effects on individual economies and the global trading system, thereby complicating standard macroeconomic analyses. For many of the new and challenging questions brought about by this phenomenon, such as its impact on the global business cycle and measurements of competitiveness, the answer largely depends on one specific aspect of global value chains: how easily they can re-configure in response to changes in prices. We propose a parsimonious, generalized specification to test the degree of global-supply-chain flexibility. Our estimates show that, in the short run, the production structure is highly inflexible, and that this rigidity has, if anything, risen over time as supply chains have deepened over time. This finding is robust to alternative price measures, including those that account for the U.S. dollar’s outsized role in trade through invoicing. While in the long run all estimated elasticities rise, supply chains remain somewhat inflexible. Our results have implications for analyses of cross-country business-cycle dynamics, the propagation of sectoral shocks, and the measurement of international competitiveness.


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