The purpose of this paper is to test whether institutional governance and its performance is a main driving force to achieve a positive relationship between natural resources and economic growth in the long run. The main objective is to ascertain what kind of institutional governance would be...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the effects of municipal mergers in Japan’s local public expenditure. In order to evaluate the expenditure of municipal...

In the context of China without a median voter system, this study examines whether the “flypaper effect”, an unconditional lump-sum grant from the upper governments to the county governments increases spending in a greater proportion than an equivalent rise in local income, holds true in...

Abstract—We investigated the determinants of inpatient rehabilitation costs in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and examined the relationship between length of stay (LOS) and discharge costs using data from VA and community rehabilitation hospitals. We estimated regression models to...

I estimate short and long-run price elasticities of U.S. natural gas supply and demand. For robustness, the estimates are based on data of varying frequencies and samples, some of which include the recent U.S. shale gas boom. Aside from the numbers themselves, there are two main conclusions. As...

In transposing EU Directive 73/2009/CE on natural gas infrastructures into Italy’s national legislation, the country opted for a Independent Transmission Operator (ITO) model instead of full ownership unbundling. ITO allows the essential facility to be controlled by a vertically integrated...

The Republic of Azerbaijan is one of the oil and gas rich countires of the former Soviet Union. After the second stage of the Shah Deniz gas field, natural gas exltation and exportation became one of the key issues in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas stategy. Diversification of the oil and gas...

The Japanese government initiated a series of regulatory reforms in the mid-1990s. The Japanese urban gas industry consists of various sized private and non-private firms. Numerous previous studies find that deregulation leads to productivity improvements. We extend the literature by analyzing...

The concept of energy security can be rather difficult to precisely define. In fact, the scope of energy security includes a somewhat different set of issues in the gas sector than in the electricity sector. After all, electricity can be produced in every country of the European Union, but gas...

We address the causes behind the drop in natural gas production in Argentina since 2004, starting from a basic supply model that depends on economic incentives, and adding control variables related to different potential explanations such as firm specific (or area specific) behavior and the...