Renewable electricity policies promote investment in renewable electricity generators and have become increasingly common around the world. Because of intermittency and the composition of other generators in the power system, the value of certain renewables---particularly wind and solar---varies...

The recent push for a federal energy policy that could substantially change electricity prices in the U.S. highlights the need to obtain accurate residential electricity demand estimates. Many electricity demand estimates have been obtained based on the assumption that consumers optimize with...

We investigate the impacts of electricity market restructuring on fuel effciency, utilization and, new to this area, cost of coal purchases among coal-fired power plants using a panel data set from 1991 to 2005. Our study focuses exclusively on coal-fired power plants and uses panel data...

Since 2007, coal-fired electricity generation in the US has declined by a stunning 25%. At the same time, natural gas-fired generation and wind generation have dramatically increased due to technological advances and policy interventions. We examine the joint impact of natural gas prices and...

Strikingly, Ogawa and Wildasin (2009) find that in a model with heterogenous jurisdictions, interjurisdictional capital flows, and interjurisdictional environmental damage spillovers, decentralized planning outcomes are equivalent to that under a single centralized planner. Taken to its extreme...

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a consortium of northeastern states that have agreed to limit carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation through a regional emissions trading program. Since the initiative came into effect in 2009, emissions have dropped precipitously,...

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have been implemented in many US states as a mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and become more energy independent. One of these states, Colorado, has enacted an RPS requiring 20% of electricity sold within the state come from renewable sources...

This paper develops a stylized supply-demand model for a mineral / nonrenewable commodity. It embodies important distinctions between short-run and long-run mineral supply and the derived demand for minerals as intermediate goods in production sectors with differing intensities of use. This...

The terms of trade debate initiated by Raul Prebisch and Hans Singer over 60 years ago continues to this day and is unlikely to be resolved soon. However, even if Prebisch and Singer are right and the terms of trade of countries exporting primary products are falling, to suggest that these...

Growth regressions are often influenced by extreme observations in the sample. We demonstrate the usefulness of a simple Monte Carlo method as a diagnostic for sample robustness. We apply the technique to a data set used by Mehlum et al. (2006), who show that institutional quality is decisive...