Output-based carbon regulations--such as fuel economy standards and the rate-based standards in the Clean Power Plan--create well-known incentives to inefficiently increase output. Similar distortions are created by attribute-based regulations. This paper demonstrates that, despite these...

Relationship-specific learning is consequential because it implies that relationship stability is important to productivity. When two firms accumulate experience working together, relationship-specific intellectual capital is created that cannot be appropriated to pairings with other firms. If...

Despite widespread application of real options theory in the literature, the extent to which firms actually delay irreversible investments following an increase in the uncertainty of their environment is not empirically well-known. This paper estimates firms' responsiveness to changes in...

What are the implications of gasoline price volatility for the design of fuel economy policies? I show that this problem has a strong parallel to Weitzman's (1974) classic model of using price or quantity controls to regulate an externality. Changes in fuel prices act as shocks to the marginal...

Oil and gas leases between mineral owners and extraction firms ubiquitously include royalty and primary term clauses. The royalty denotes the share of revenue that is paid to the mineral owner, and the primary term specifies the date by which the firm must complete a well, lest it lose the...

The recent large-scale use of railroads to transport crude oil out of newly discovered shale formations has no recent precedent in the U.S. oil industry. This paper addresses the question of whether crude-by-rail is simply a transient phenomenon, owing to delays in pipeline construction, or...

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...

Regulators and firms often use incentive schemes to attract skillful agents and to induce them to put forth effort in pursuit of the principals' goals. Incentive schemes that reward skill and effort, however, may also punish agents for adverse outcomes beyond their control. As a result, such...

A full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices. We provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the Michigan...

Technological innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have enabled tremendous amounts of natural gas to be extracted profitably from underground shale formations that were long thought to be uneconomical. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of broad-scale welfare...