This paper compares outcomes from informally negotiated oil and gas leases to those awarded via centralized auction. We focus on Texas, where legislative decisions in the early twentieth century assigned thousands of proximate parcels to different mineral allocation mechanisms. We show that...

The strong positive relationship between corporate cash flow and investment has been interpreted through the lens of both agency- and non-agency-based models. In this paper, we distinguish between these two interpretations using project-level data in the oil and gas industry. The specific...

In 2019, production on federal lands comprised 40% of domestic coal, 22% of domestic oil, and 12% of domestic natural gas production. Currently, the federal fossil fuel leasing program does not consider the climate costs of burning federal fossil fuels. One way to do so is through a climate...

The combining of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing unleashed a boom in oil and natural gas production in the US. This technological shift interacts with local geology to create an exogenous shock to county income and employment. We measure the effects of these shocks within the county...

Labor mobility is often considered to be an important source of knowledge externalities, making it difficult for firms to appropriate returns to R&D investments. In this paper, I argue that inter-firm transfers of knowledge embodied in people should be analyzed within a human capital framework....

A number of market failures have been associated with R&D investments and significant amounts of public money have been spent on programs to stimulate innovative activities. In this paper, we review some recent microeconomic studies evaluating effects of government sponsored commercial R&D. We...

This paper revisits the proposal to use options in corporate bankruptcy that was put forward in Bebchuk (1988). According to the proposed procedure, corporate bankruptcy should be implemented through the distribution to participants of appropriately designed options. The paper starts by...

Although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant-date market price, in practice virtually all options are granted at the money. We offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle, by showing that pay-to-performance incentives for risk-averse...