Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 created a market for electric utility emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2). Recent papers have argued that flaws in the design of the auctions that are part of this market have adversely affected its performance. These papers incorrectly assume that...

Future electricity systems with tight constraints on carbon emissions will rely much more on wind and solar generation, with zero marginal cost, than today. We use capacity expansion modelling of Texas in 2050 to illustrate wholesale price distributions in future energy-only, carbon-constrained...

Currently, most U.S. electricity consumers pay a constant price per kWh consumed that accounts for most of their bill. Ongoing developments in the power system increase efficiency gains that can be made from exposing consumers to widely varying wholesale spot prices. Pure spot pricing is not...

This paper discusses U.S. energy policy and the associated evolution of energy supply, energy demand, energy prices and the industrial organization of the domestic energy industries during the period 1991 through 2000. This period covers the last two years of the George H. W. Bush administration...

This paper discusses the political, regulatory and economic factors that led to California's electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001. It begins with a discussion of the origins of California's electricity restructuring and competition programs. It then discusses the structure of the wholesale and...

This paper examines the structure, behavior and performance of the N95 respirator market in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-early 2022). It focuses on the behavior and performance of government and private sector organizations in the allocation of scarce supplies of N95...

In a typical bank credit card transaction, the merchant's bank pays an interchange fee, collectively determined by all participating banks, to the cardholder's bank. This paper shows how the interchange fee balances charges between cardholders and merchants under imperfect competition. The...

Government subsidies have driven rapid growth in U.S. wind and solar generation. Using data on hourly outputs and prices for 25 wind and nine solar generating plants, some results of those subsidies are studied in detail: the value of these plants' outputs, the variability of output at plant and...

The U.S. regulation of high-voltage transmission is highly complex and, as a result, generally poorly understood. The complexity is created by separate, but overlapping, jurisdictional authorities of the U.S. federal regulators and those of individual states, districts, and territories. While...

This study explores the effect of regulatory and political constraints on the level of CEO compensation for 87 state-regulated electric utilities during 1978-1990. The results suggest that political pressures may constrain top executive pay levels in this industry. First, CEOs of firms operating...