In promoting energy efficiency, not only are technological innovations necessary, but so is learning about behavioral barriers that often arise from end-user interactions with new technologies. To better understand the adoption, continued use and diffusion process of the CFL technology, this study uses randomized experiments to inspect two major mechanisms: (1) the “rebound” or behavioral response that boosts consumption and offsets CFLs’ technologically feasible electricity savings, and (2) the role of “peer” networks in spreading information. Examination of the rebound will provide information on the optimal combination of innovation and price policies, and the tradeoff between welfare and electricity conservation. Examination of peer-networks will discern between different learning mechanisms and tell how best to advance CFLs’ diffusion.

Participation in the 1992 Mexican land-titling program PROCEDE allowed agricultural communities (ejidos) to choose between communal certificates with usufruct rights and private individual titles with full rights. The assumption motivating traditional land reforms and titling programs is that individuals have greater incentives to operate under individual private ownership. However, the variation in choice of tenure arrangements resulting from PROCEDE contests this view. I examine how observed choices of common over individual tenure are motivated by a need to insure against ecological shocks, how new technologies of production prompt changes in tenure arrangements, and how household fertility responds to opportunities of risk-diversification offered by communal arrangements. I am currently collecting land registry information and ejido census information, including land parceling, population, infrastructure, production and assembly voting records for more than thirty thousand ejido communities since 1935.

According to traditional Islamic inheritance principles only the son of a deceased man can exclude his male agnates from inheritance and preserve his estate within the nuclear household. In this study, I examine whether the son preference and fertility behavior of Muslims couples respond to the risk of inheritance expropriation by their extended family. I exploit cross-sectional and time variation in the application of the Islamic inheritance exclusion rule in Indonesia: between Muslim and non-Muslim populations affected by different legal systems, across men with different sibling sex composition, and before and after a change in Islamic law that allowed female children to exclude male relatives. I find that Muslim couples that are more affected by the exclusion rule exhibit stronger son preference, practice sex-differential fertility stopping, attain a higher proportion of sons and have larger families than non-Muslims or Muslims for whom the exclusion rule is less binding.

The female population deficit in India has been explained in a number of ways, but the great heterogeneity in the deficit across districts within India still remains an open question. I argue that across India, a largely agrarian economy, soil texture varies exogenously and determines the technology of agricultural production. Labor-saving deep plow technology, used in loamy but not in clayey soils, reduces female relative to male employment and has a negative impact on the relative value of girls to a household. I find that 62 percent of within-state variation in the relative participation of women in agriculture and 70 percent of the variation in infant sex ratios can be explained by differences between the fractions of loamy and clayey soils in a district. I show that alternate mechanisms –productivity, crop mix, migration or culture– do not account for the results. Channels of influence on the sex ratio include pre-natal sex selection and fewer investments in female child immunizations. Although lesser labor market opportunities for women in deep plow agriculture reduce investments on the survival of girls relative to boys, they also reduce the time opportunity cost of investments in female education.