This short essay, forthcoming in Competition Policy International, summarizes and evaluates Jeffrey Rohlfs' 1974 Bell Journal paper, "A Theory of Interdependent Demand for a Telecommunications Service." Rohlfs' work helped create a large literature on markets with network externalities in which...

In a typical bank credit card transaction, the merchant's bank pays an interchange fee, collectively determined by all participating banks, to the cardholder's bank. This paper shows how the interchange fee balances charges between cardholders and merchants under imperfect competition. The...

Though U.S. manufacturing output recovered more slowly from the Great Recession than historical experience would have predicted, manufacturing employment, which peaked in 1979, grew between 2010 and 2017. This was the second-longest period of employment growth in the entire post-war period....

Government subsidies have driven rapid growth in U.S. wind and solar generation. Using data on hourly outputs and prices for 25 wind and nine solar generating plants, some results of those subsidies are studied in detail: the value of these plants' outputs, the variability of output at plant and...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

This essay provides an overview of the major emissions trading programs of the past thirty years on which significant documentation exists, and draws a number of important lessons for future applications of this environmental policy instrument. References to a larger number of other emissions...

This essay provides an overview of the major emissions trading programs of the past thirty years on which significant documentation exists, and draws a number of important lessons for future applications of this environmental policy instrument. References to a larger number of other emissions...