In May 2007 the Federal Trade Commission failed to win a preliminary injunction in U.S. District Court that would have blocked the merger of two refiners that served Albuquerque, NM and surrounding areas. This study compares estimates of the post-merger price effect to the price effects...

Perceptions about high U.S. gasoline prices or inexplicable differentials in prices between geographic areas have prompted a range of disparate policy proposals. However, there is a distinct lack of consensus on the cause of undesirable price dynamics. These dynamics are likely to be the product...

The capture theory of regulation concludes that regulatory agencies tend to be captured by the firms they are regulating. This paper tests the capture theory in the recent environment of nuanced agency regulation by the administrative state, focusing on the U.S. oil refining industry. Regulation...

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...