The standard approach to recovering the cost of electricity provision is to bill customers monthly for past consumption. If unable to pay, customers face disconnection, the utility loses revenue, and the service provision model is undermined. A possible solution to this problem is prepaid...

India, seeking to reduce electricity shortages, set up a new power market, in which transmission constraints sharply limit trade between regions. I use confidential bidding data to estimate the costs of power supply and simulate market outcomes with more transmission capacity. I find that the...

Federal and state policies in the U.S. subsidize electricity generation from 1.4 million rooftop solar arrays because of pollution avoidance benefits and grid congestion relief. Yet because these benefits vary across the U.S. according to solar irradiance, technologies of electricity generators,...

While time-varying retail electricity pricing is very popular with economists, that support is not matched among regulators and consumers. Many papers have been written estimating and extolling the societal benefits of time-varying rates -- especially dynamic rates that change on a day's notice...

We estimate the effects of electricity shortages on Indian manufacturers, instrumenting with supply shifts from hydroelectric power availability. We estimate that India's average reported level of shortages reduces the average plant's revenues and producer surplus by five to ten percent, but...

In many countries, unreliable inputs, particularly those lacking storage, can significantly limit a firm's productivity. In the case of an increasing frequency of blackouts, a firm may change factor shares in a number of ways. It may decide to self generate electricity, to purchase intermediate...

In an unregulated electricity generation market, the degree to which generators in" different locations compete with one another depends on the capacity to transmit electricity" between the locations. We study the impact of transmission capacity on competition among" generators. We show that...

We examine the performance attributes of a merchant transmission investment framework that relies on market driven' transmission investment to provide the infrastructure to support competitive wholesale markets for electricity. Under a stringent set of assumptions, the merchant investment model...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of taxation on economic activity. We use the narrative record -- presidential speeches, executive-branch documents, and Congressional reports -- to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major postwar tax policy...

An important goal of the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education was to improve the quality of the schools black children attended. This paper uses a new dataset to examine the effects of desegregation on public and private enrollment and...