Property rights are the most fundamental institution in any society. They determine who has decision-making authority over assets and who bears the costs and benefits of those decisions. They assign ownership, wealth, political influence, and social standing. They make markets possible; define...

We examine Harold Demsetz's (1967) prediction that property rights would emerge and be refined once the benefits of doing so exceeded the costs. We follow the gradual development of property rights to subsurface oil and gas deposits in the United States through private and political negotiations...

This paper considers the effects of refinery outages (due to planned turn-arounds or unplanned events) on current petroleum product prices and future refinery investment. Empirical evidence on these relationships is mixed and highly dependent on the size and duration of the outage, the...

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of...

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of...

As of late 2008, the steady decline of U.S. crude oil production over the last decades was reversed by the increased adoption of the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technology. Adapting the supply-side model proposed by Kaufmann et al. (2004) to assess OPEC’s ability to influence real oil...