Product differentiation and variety is a hallmark of modern capitalism. In academic economics, did you know that we have 1043 journals to choose from? Here is the rankings list. I haven't heard of 964 of these journals but still I celebrate our degree of choice. I wanted to see a list of all the journals because my wife and I have a funky new paper. It is a major revision of an old paper that was rejected on a second round at a very good journal because I made some mistakes in how I wrote the paper. I've learned my lesson and I've streamlined the paper down to just a couple of tables.
The paper uses unique micro data to document that political liberal home owners consume less electricity than observationally identical political conservatives. This liberal/conservative differential is the largest during the summer months. We document that this liberal/conservative differential shrinks when we control for the home owner's size of home, whether the home owner has a pool, the number of people in the household. Liberals and conservatives live their lives in different ways. Note that this isn't flashy Prius ownership. In this case, it is consumption of a privately observable commodity for which your neighbors do not observe.
