Residential natural gas customers in the United States face volumetric charges for natural gas that average about 30% more than marginal cost. The large markup on natural gas - which is used to cover the fixed infrastructure and operating costs of the local distribution companies - is widely...

It is well recognized by economists that long-term contracting under an array of price and non-price provisions may be an efficient response to small-numbers bargaining problems. Empirical work to distinguish such issues from predictions of models of market power and bargaining has been sparse,...

This paper examines the effects of the U.S. shale oil boom in a two-country DSGE model where countries produce crude oil, refined oil products, and a non-oil good. The model incorporates different types of crude oil that are imperfect substitutes for each other as inputs into the refining...

A direct consequence of imposing a ceiling on the price of a good for which secondary markets do not exist, is that, when there is excess demand, the good will not be allocated to the buyers who value it the most. The resulting allocative cost has been discussed in the literature as a...

I generalize a benchmark model of directed technical change to allow innovations and factors of production (here energy resources) to be substitutes or complements. I show that a dominant sector is forever locked-in under substitutability but researchers' market incentives can drive a transition...

There has been a widespread displacement of coal by natural gas as space heating and cooking technology in Turkey in the last two decades, triggered by the deployment of natural gas networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of this development on mortality among adults and the elderly. Our...

We analyze how a country's political institutions affect oil production within its borders. We find a pronounced negative relationship between political openness and volatility in oil production, with democratic regimes exhibiting less volatility than more autocratic regimes. This relationship...

The price of crude oil in the U.S. never exceeded $40 per barrel until mid-2004. By 2006 it reached$70, and in July 2008 it peaked at $145. By late 2008 it had plummeted to about $30 before increasingto $110 in 2011. Are speculators at least partly to blame for these sharp price changes? We...

This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...

We use a new micro data set that covers all oil fields in the world to estimate a stochastic industry-equilibrium model of the oil industry with two alternative market structures. In the first, all firms are competitive. In the second, OPEC firms act as a cartel. This effort is a first step...