This paper describes the U.S. offshore oil and gas lease sales, conducted by the Department of the Interior since 1954. Several decision problems are discussed, including bidding for leases, the government's decision whether to accept the highest bid, the incidence and timing of exploratory...

An oil lease auction is the classic example motivating a common values model. However, formal testing for common values has been hindered by unobserved auction-level heterogeneity, which is likely to affect both participation in an auction and bidders' willingness to pay. We develop and apply an...

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 presents a novel methodology for estimating impacts on domestic supply of oil and natural gas arising from changes in the tax treatment of oil and gas production. It corrects a downward bias when the ratio of aggregate tax expenditures to domestic production is used to measure the...

We develop equilibrium models of an exhaustible resource market where both prices and extraction choices are determined endogenously. Our analysis highlights a role for adjustment costs in generating price dynamics that are consistent with observed oil and gas forward prices as well as with the...

This paper studies the investment activities of 44 independent oil and gas firms from 1978 to 1986. It develops a dynamic model of oil and gas exploration and development. The model predicts less of a decline in exploration activity than actually occurred in 1985-86. I consider the extent to...

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effect of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. Further, along both sides of a state border, a change in one state's sales tax can shed light on the nature of competition, as a subset of firms effectively experiences a change in...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

We quantify the effect of a significant technological innovation, shale oil development, on asset prices. Using stock returns on major news announcement days allows us to link aggregate stock price fluctuations to shale technology innovations. We exploit cross-sectional variation in industry...

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...