The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires incumbent monopoly phone companies to lease elements of their networks to rivals. An important policy question is whether these unbundled elements are substitutes for entry modes that are more facilities-based. In this article, we estimate demand...

Electricity regulators often mandate increasing-block pricing (IBP)—i.e., marginal price increases with the customer's average daily usage—to protect low-income households from rising costs. IBP has no cost basis, raising a classic conflict between efficiency and distributional goals....

Beginning in the late 1990s, electricity markets in many US states were deregulated, and almost half of the nation's 103 nuclear power reactors were sold to independent power producers. Deregulation has been accompanied by substantial market consolidation, and today the three largest companies...

The past ten years have seen a number of European regulatory authorities introduce statutory incentives to the electricity distribution sector aimed at improving efficiency, supporting investment, and increasing service quality. In practice, these incentive schemes evolve over time to account...

Many countries use substantial public funds to subsidize reductions in negative externalities. However, such subsidies create asymmetric incentives because increases in externalities remain unpriced. This paper examines implications of such asymmetric subsidy incentives by using a regression...

US climate policy is unfolding under the Clean Air Act. Mobile source and construction permitting regulations are in place. Most important, EPA and the states will determine the form and stringency of the regulations for power plants. Various approaches would create an implicit price on emitting...

This paper evaluates changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and gas-fired power plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation of electricity generation. I find that deregulated plants substantially reduce the price paid for coal (but...