This article proposes the estimation of marginal cost of individual firms using semiparametric and nonparametric methods. These methods have a number of appealing features when applied to cost functions. The empirical analysis uses data from a unique sample of the California electricity industry...

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizeable negative effect on loan spreads: a one-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but...