UC San Diego

This dissertation studies our relationship with energy, as individuals and as a society. In the first chapter, I look at individual response to gasoline prices by investigating the relationship between gasoline prices and running out of gasoline. In the second chapter I investigate household level short-run responses to gasoline prices by decomposing the traditional fuel use elasticity into changes in driving and change in average fuel economy. The third chapter looks at policies that comes as responses to environmental externalities associated with fuel use