The percentage of U.S. homes heated with electricity has increased steadily from 1% in 1950, to 8% in 1970, to 26% in 1990, to 39% in 2018. This paper investigates the key determinants of this increase in electrification using data on heating choices from millions of U.S. households over a...

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...

This paper evaluates changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and gas-fired power plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation of electricity generation. I find that deregulated plants substantially reduce the price paid for coal (but...

Open access, competitive exploitation can be incredibly damaging to valuable resources and the human populations that depend upon them. Even though wealth, resource rents and stocks are at stake, open access often seems to be ineffectively addressed across time and space. Institutions vary....

We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a natural gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean sources and the direction of technology is endogenous. In the short run, a natural gas boom reduces carbon emissions by inducing substitution away...

Natural gas has replaced coal as the dominant fuel for U.S. electricity generation. However, U.S. states that regulate electric utilities have retired coal more slowly than others. We build a structural model of rate-of-return regulation during an energy transition where utilities face tradeoffs...

In many industries firms can learn about new technologies from other adopters; mandatory disclosure regulations represent an understudied channel for this type of social learning. We study an environmentally-focused law in the shale gas industry to examine firms' claims that disclosure...

Economic theory suggests that energy subsidies can lead to excessive consumption and environmental degradation. However, the precise impact of energy subsidies is not well understood. We analyze a large energy subsidy: the California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE). CARE provides a price...

This paper measures the extent to which prices exceed marginal costs in the U.S. natural gas distribution market during the period 1991-2007. We find large departures from marginal cost pricing in all 50 states, with residential and commercial customers facing average markups of over 40%. Based...

This paper proposes a simple two-step estimation method (Climate Adaptive Response Estimation - CARE) to estimate sectoral climate damage functions, which account for long- run adaptation. The paper applies this method in the context of residential electricity and natural gas demand for the...