Policymakers frequently propose to use capital tax reform to stimulate investment and increase labor earnings. This paper tests for such real impacts of the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a U.S. capital tax rate—using a quasi-experimental design and a large sample...

The American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) significantly lowered US firms' tax cost when accessing their unrepatriated foreign earnings. Using this temporary shock to the cost of internal financing, we examine the role of capital constraints in firms' investment decisions. Controlling for the...

This paper examines the impact of the deregulation of compulsory industrial licensing in India on firm-size dynamics and the reallocation of resources within industries over time. Following deregulation, we find that the extent of resource misallocation declines and a considerable thickening of...

Estimating market power is often complicated by the lack of reliable measures of marginal cost. Instead, policy-makers often rely on other summary statistics of the market, thought to be correlated with price cost margins---such as concentration ratios or the HHI. In many industries, these...

We estimate a model of vehicle choice and miles driven to analyze the impact of fuel conservation policies in the Indian car market. Taxing diesel fuel to equalize diesel and petrol prices would reduce fuel consumption in the new car market by 7% and reduce diesel cars sales by 26%. A tax on...

We study the returns to owning dry bulk cargo ships. Ship earnings exhibit a high degree of mean reversion, driven by industry participants' competitive investment responses to shifts in demand. Ship prices are far too volatile given the mean reversion in earnings. We show that high current ship...

Despite all of the talk about deregulation' of the electricity sector, a large number of non-market mechanisms have been imposed on emerging competitive wholesale and retail markets. These mechanisms include spot market price caps, operating reserve requirements, non-price rationing protocols,...

We analyze a number of unstudied aspects of retail electricity competition. We first explore the implications of load profiling of consumers whose traditional meters do not allow for measurement of their real time consumption, when consumers are homogeneous up to a scaling factor. In general,...

We examine the bidding behavior of firms competing on ERCOT, the hourly electricity balancing market in Texas. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding into this uniform-price divisible-good auction market. Using detailed firm-level data on bids and marginal costs of generation, we find...