There is a tradeoff that must be addressed any time a contract is written; whether or not to make a contract flexible but incomplete or rigid but comprehensive. This paper investigates the completeness of hydroelectric license contracts over a nearly three decade time span and finds that as...

This paper documents the current initiatives college and university campuses across North America are taking to address issues of environmental awareness and ecological sustainability. After taking a look at what campuses are doing in a practical sense to address environmental concerns, the...

This paper analyzes ownership trends of nonfederal hydropower generating assets from 1980-2003. Previous research has shown that the overall electricity industry is unique in that, because of the extreme inelasticity of demand for power, even small sectors of the industry have the potential to...

This paper investigates the sources for regulatory delay in bureaucratic decision making, testing regulatory capture, congressional dominance, and bureaucratic discretion theories of agency behavior. The empirical context concerns relicenses issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission...

The use and prevalence of JEL code categorization is wide in the field of economics, but what do JEL code classifications actually tell us? And are they used with consistency by academics in the field? Utilizing a dataset of articles published in the American Economic Review from 1990-2008, we...

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must balance environmental protection of riverine resources with the nation's growing demand for power production every time it issues a new hydroelectric license. This paper models the bureaucratic agency's decision making process in issuing these...

In this paper we investigate whether academic research attention to certain public policy related measures (including unemployment, inflation, bankruptcies, and GDP) is correlated with empirical measurements of the measures themselves. In other words, when unemployment rises, does academic...

This paper presents the results of a text based exploratory study of over 20,000 academic articles published in seven top research journals from 1960-2010. The goal is to investigate the general research foci of economists over the last fifty years, how (if at all) they have changed over time,...

Do general interest journals set the trends in research attention to particular topics, or is it field journals that have greater initial influence? In this paper, we focus on the subfield of environmental economics and attempt to empirically identify whether it has been the leading general...