Our histories depart somewhat from the bulk of the energy innovation policy literature in focusing attention on the role of vigorous competition - particularly entry - in stimulating innovation, suggesting that in several industries a mix of public policies - including procurement, antitrust and...

We develop a spatial model of energy exploitation where energy sources are differentiated by their geographic location and energy density. The spatial setting creates a scaling law that magnifies the importance of differences across energy sources. As a result, renewable sources twice as dense,...

The most cost-effective policies for achieving CO2 abatement (e.g., carbon taxes) fail to get off the ground politically because of unacceptable distributional consequences. This paper explores CO2 abatement policies designed to address distributional concerns. Using an intertemporal numerical...

This paper discusses contributions that industrial organization economists have made to our understanding of energy markets and environmental regulation. We emphasize the substantive contributions of recent papers while also highlighting how this literature has adopted and sometimes augmented...

We analyze optimal policy when consumers of energy-using durables undervalue energy costs relative to their private optima. First, there is an Internality Dividend from Externality Taxes: aside from reducing externalities, they also offset distortions from underinvestment in energy efficiency....

We study the optimal pattern of outlays for a single firm pursuing an R&D program over time. In the deterministic case, (a) the amount of progress required to complete the project is known, and (b) the relationship between outlays and progress is known. In this case, it is optimal to increase...

A new algorithm for the group minimization problem (GP) is proposed. The algorithm can be broadly described as follows. A suitable relaxation of(GP) is defined, in which any feasible point satisfies the group equation but may have negative components. The feasible points of the relaxation are...

The problem of simultaneously identifying and controlling a time-varying, perfectly-observed linear system is posed. The parameters are assumed to obey a Markov structure and are estimated with a Kalman filter. The problem can be solved conceptually by dynamic programming, but even with a...

We benchmark seven global optimization algorithms by comparing their performance on challenging multidimensional test functions as well as a method of simulated moments estimation of a panel data model of earnings dynamics. Five of the algorithms are taken from the popular NLopt open-source...