The Redistributional Impact of Nonlinear Electricity Pricing
研究了加州递增阶梯电价（IBP）对低收入家庭的保护效果，发现其再分配效应有限但造成较大效率损失，并指出常用收入分布研究方法可能误导。
Electricity regulators often mandate increasing-block pricing (IBP)—i.e., marginal price increases with the customer's average daily usage—to protect low-income households from rising costs. IBP has no cost basis, raising a classic conflict between efficiency and distributional goals. Combining household-level utility billing data with census data on income, I find that IBP in California results in modest wealth redistribution, but creates substantial deadweight loss relative to the transfers. I also show that a common approach to studying income distribution effects by using median household income within census block groups may be misleading.