State-regulated investor-owned utilities serve over 70 percent of electricity to final end-use retail consumers in the U.S. Prior to the 1990s, all states used a “cost of service (COS)” regulation regime in which investor-owned utilities were allowed to recover prudently incurred costs plus...

We examine the relationship between fossil fuel (FF) endowments and economic convergence. Countries with plausibly exogenous FF endowments show patterns of convergence, as indicated by standard convergence tests. By contrast, we fi nd no evidence of convergence among countries without FF...

Over the past five years the U.S. domestic crude benchmark, WTI, diverged considerably from its foreign counterpart, Brent. Some studies pointed to the crude oil export ban as the main culprit for this divergence, but pipeline capacity was also scarce during this time. To understand the drivers...

Understanding how changes to local labor market conditions impact household spending and savings decisions is a central topic in labor economics. Frequently, housing is the largest item on a household's balance sheet, and therefore making monthly mortgage payments is often both the largest...

Household wealth and liquidity are key factors in individuals' college enrollment choices. Therefore we investigate the impact of housing wealth, credit availability and financial distress on college enrollment decisions. We find that housing wealth is negatively related to enrollment in public...

Thirty states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) that set targets for renewable energy generation by mandating electric power utilities obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources. To date, there have been a number of studies that have consistently found that...

Thirty states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) that set targets for renewable energy generation by mandating that electric power utilities obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources. Our synthetic control model finds that states with RPSs experience...

The shale oil and gas boom in the U.S. provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a "boom town" environment, to derive insights about economic expansions more generally, and to obtain clean identification of the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business...