This paper develops a model of optimal education choice of an agent who has an option to emigrate. Using a real options framework, we analyze the time evolution of human capital in the home country and investigate the role of migration opportunities in the accumulation of different types of...

In this paper,we discuss the implications of financing constraints for future energy and climate scenarios. Aspirations to improve energy access and electrification rates in developing countries, while simultaneously reducing green house gas emissions, can be seriously hindered by the...

This paper tests the integration property of US natural gas consumption at the sector level and finds a heterogenous behavior. Residential, commercial, and power consumption are stationary. However, even after allowing for endogenous structural breaks, tests fail to reject unit-root in the...

In an open economy, the foreign exchange rate (FER) influences incentives for the cross-border shopping of gasoline as well as the opportunity cost of using vehicles and the relative attractiveness of home versus foreign travel. Using monthly regional-level data of gasoline consumption in Iran,...

Should oil-rich countries aggressively move toward downstream and invest in the oil refinery industry? This is a crucial energy policy question for such economies. We offer theoretical models for a vertical integration strategy (i.e. downstream investment) within an oil-producing economy. The...

We exploit three major transport fuel (gasoline and diesel) subsidy reforms in Iran, as quasi-experiments, to investigate the impact of permanent upward price changes on the responsiveness of fuel consumption. We employ monthly regional-level data of fuel consumption in Iran and also explicitly...

We investigate whether virtual water trade may alleviate the initial unequal distribution of hydric resources. On average, countries that are relatively abundant (with respect to capital) in the combined availability of water and arable land are, in absolute terms, scarce in capital and rich in...