This paper discusses contributions that industrial organization economists have made to our understanding of energy markets and environmental regulation. We emphasize the substantive contributions of recent papers while also highlighting how this literature has adopted and sometimes augmented...

The energy price shock depressed real output by two percent in 1974 and by five percent in 1975, according to our results. Prices rose by four percent in 1974 and by another two percent in 1975. These conclusions are derived from an aggregate model of the U.S. economy with an explicit role of...

Policies supporting investment in renewable electricity have been a cornerstone of climate policy in many parts of the world. While previous empirical work explores the economic and environmental impacts of renewable production, the focus has exclusively been on the short-run impacts of...

We report on an economic experiment that compares outcomes in electricity markets subject to carbon-tax and cap-and-trade policies. Under conditions of uncertainty, price-based and quantity-based policy instruments cannot be truly equivalent, so we compared three matched carbon-tax/cap-and-trade...

This paper evaluates alternative indicators of global economic activity and other market fundamentals in terms of their usefulness for forecasting real oil prices and global petroleum consumption. We find that world industrial production is one of the most useful indicators that has been...

In electricity markets, generators are rewarded both for providing energy and for enabling grid reliability. The two functions are compensated in separate markets: energy markets and ancillary services markets. We provide evidence of changes in the fuel mix in the energy market that is driven by...

U.S. inflation data exhibit two notable spikes into the double-digit range in 1973-1974 and again in 1978-1980. The well-known "supply-shock" explanation attributes both spikes to large food and energy shocks plus, in the case of 1973-1974, the removal of price controls. Yet critics of this...

Restructuring electricity markets has enabled wholesalers to exercise market power. Using a common method of measuring competitive behavior in these markets, several studies have found substantial inefficiencies. This method overstates actual welfare loss by ignoring production constraints that...

Oligopoly models of short-run price competition predict that large firms can exercise market power and generate inefficiencies. Inefficiency, however, can arise from other sources as well, such as from heterogeneity in strategic sophistication. We study such a setting in the Texas electricity...

We examine the environmental impact of the post-2005 natural gas glut in the United States due to the shale gas boom. Our focus is on quantifying short-term coal-to-gas switching decisions by different types of electric power plants in response to changes in the relative price of the two fuels....