This paper examines the impact of learning about the adverse effects of climate change on households’ environmental behaviors. We rely on natural disaster-triggered climate discussions from friends to generate exogenous variations in the intensity of learning. Utilizing proprietary data from a major food delivery platform in the U.S., we find that individuals’ learning about their friends’ disaster experiences via social media translates into a dietary transition towards foods with a low-carbon footprint. Friends' climate-related social media posts act as an accelerator, enhancing these changes in consumption patterns. Further, individuals subsequently increase their own climate change discussions online, creating a reinforcing information-consumption loop that propagates through the network.

Relying on county-level capital gains realization information and state-level capital gains tax rates, we provide direct evidence that capital gains tax rate intertemporal discontinuity—the difference between short-term and long-term rates—reduces capital gains realization. More importantly, this negative association increases with adjusted gross income and taxpayer age, two prominent taxpayer characteristics associated with added reluctance to realize short-term capital gains. Further, taxpayer sophistication, as reflected in attention paid to capital gains tax and the number of local tax professionals, enhances the negative association between gain realization and rate discontinuity, while risk-taking preference and individualism mitigate taxpayers’ tendency to delay capital gains realization due to rate discontinuity. Our results provide direct evidence of a negative effect of tax rate discontinuity on capital gains realization, and we demonstrate that the desire to delay quick realization of capital gains due to rate discontinuity varies consistently with taxpayers’ characteristics and incentives.

Tax avoidance, despite its apparent damage to immediate fiscal revenue, can potentially generate positive externalities that fuel otherwise absent economic activities. Using U.S. county-level tax statistics and bank-level data, we show that high-income taxpayers, in anticipation of a tax increase in 2013, accelerate their taxable income realizations, especially capital gains. A significant portion of the proceeds goes to bank deposits. This increase in deposits leads banks to expand their credit supply, with much of the additional lending going to real estate loans that benefit small residential properties, especially in counties with lower levels of income and educational attainment and greater shares of rural population. Our research provides evidence that intertemporal income shifting, while reducing immediate tax revenue, has a positive externality on credit supply and potentially enhances financial inclusion.