Photovoltaic systems generate electricity around noon, when many homes are empty. Conversely, residential electricity demand peaks in the evening, when production from solar sources is impossible. Based on a randomized control trial, we assess the effectiveness of alternative demand response measures aimed at mitigating these imbalances. More precisely, through information feedback and financial rewards, we encourage households to shift electricity consumption toward the middle of the day. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find that financial incentives induce a significant increase of the relative consumption during the period of the day when most solar radiation takes place. Information feedback, however, pushes households to decrease overall consumption, but induces no load shifting.

Focusing on the of 49th Swiss legislature, we build a dataset about the politicians' links with lobbying groups. We approximate political ties considering three dimensions: (1) politicians' mandates in legal entities; (2) their professions, and (3) the enterprises, associations and other organizations related to the recipients of access rights provided by politicians. This research note proposes an objective and integrated way to classify the links coming from different sources by using codes of the General Classification of Economic Activities (NOGA2008). We find that the three dimensions used to approximate politicians' links are complementary, each of them containing additional information. Our results also show that politicians' interests distribution across economic categories depends on political group, gender and geographical origin.