Evidence from the U.S. and some other countries indicates that organized wholesale markets for electrical energy and operating reserves do not provide adequate incentives to stimulate the proper quantity or mix of generating capacity consistent with mandatory reliability criteria. A large part...

This paper provides an economic analysis of the residential real estate brokerage industry. We find that the traditional model for residential real estate brokerage services may be dated, and could be improved substantially with some public policy interventions that spur innovation.We believe...

Network neutrality issues have been vigorously debated worldwide over the past few years. One major aim of network neutrality proponents is to prevent high-speed Internet service providers from charging content providers for priority delivery. Recently, proponents have turned their attention to...

Network neutrality is a policy proposal that would regulate how network providers manage and price the use of their networks. Congress has introduced several bills on network neutrality. Proposed legislation generally would mandate that Internet service providers exercise no control over the...

Much of the advocacy of legislatively-mandated network neutrality is based on a simple fallacy - namely, that differing charges to suppliers of content to the Internet for correspondingly differing speeds of delivery are inherently discriminatory. They are not; and an attempt to prohibit them...

In the face of rising congestion on the nation's road system, policymakers have explored ways to reduce travel delays. One approach has been to allocate reserved lanes - called high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes - to vehicles carrying two or more people. A recent innovation is to allow solo...

Does a State's regulatory scheme that permits in-state wineries directly to ship alcohol to consumers but restricts the ability of out-of-state wineries to do so violate the dormant Commerce Clause in light of Sec. 2 of the Twenty-first Amendment?

Since the early Reagan years, critics have argued that benefit-cost analysis is used by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as a one-sided tool of deregulation to advance the interests of business. This article discloses a little-known fact: OMB also plays a powerful pro-regulation...

Using climate change as a prototype motivating example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of catastrophes. The paper shows that having an uncertain amplifying or scaling parameter (which is updated by Bayesian learning) induces a critical quot;tail...

Broadband penetration and available speeds vary widely across OECD countries. Policymakers around the world, and especially in countries like the U.S. that lag in the rankings, are searching for policies to narrow those gaps. Relatively little empirical work tests possible reasons for these...