This paper investigates the impact of carbon pricing on the economy, with a focus on European carbon taxes and the carbon market. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, while both policies have successfully reduced emissions, the economic costs of the European carbon market are larger...

Restructuring electricity markets has enabled wholesalers to exercise market power. Using a common method of measuring competitive behavior in these markets, several studies have found substantial inefficiencies. This method overstates actual welfare loss by ignoring production constraints that...

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

American local governments own and manage a wide portfolio of enterprises, including gas and electricity companies, water systems, subways, bus systems and schools. Existing theories of public ownership, including the presence of natural monopolies, can explain much of the observed municipal...

Inefficient energy pricing hinders economic development in many countries. We examine long-run effects of a recent heating reform in China that replaced a commonly-used fixed-payment system with individually-metered pricing. Using staggered policy rollouts and administrative data on...

We study a problem in which policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in social welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects and marginal treatment responses arise as key statistics to characterize social...

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...