We quantify the intertemporal impact of a renewable quota on CO2 emissions, pollution and welfare. We find that the quota substitutes investments in base load technologies. Therefore, its environmental benefit depends on the emission intensity factors of base load technologies, not on system...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used to provide infrastructure services. Even though PPPs have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, contract renegotiations have been pervasive. We show that existing accounting standards allow governments to...

This paper estimates the residential outage cost in Chile's Central Interconnected System (SIC), using consumer's willingness to pay for energy. We first estimate the cost of reducing energy consumption efficiently, that is only the less valuable kWh (as indicated by the market demand curve) are...

Two aspects of media bias are important empirically. First, bias is persistent: it does not seem to disappear even when the media is under scrutiny. Second, bias is conflicting: different people often perceive bias in the same media outlet to be of opposite signs. We build a model in which both...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are desirable because the private sector is more efficient, the contract that optimally trades demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds is characterized by a minimum...

We present a model of coups in autocracies. Assuming that policy choices cannot be observed but are correlated with the short-run performance of the economy we find that: (a) the threat of a coup disciplines autocrats; (b) coups are more likely in recessions; (c) increasing per capita income has...

A large literature asserts that standard essential patents (SEPs) allow their owners to “hold up” innovation by charging fees that exceed their incremental contribution to a final product. We evaluate two central, interrelated predictions of this SEP hold-up hypothesis: (1) SEP-reliant...

In this paper we show that fixed-term contracts, which are commonly used to franchise highways, do not allocate demand risk optimally. We characterize the optimal risk sharing contract and show that it can be implemented with a fairly straightforward mechanism---an LPVR auction. Instead of...

In this paper we show that fixed-term contracts, which are commonly used to franchise highways, do not allocate demand risk optimally. We characterize the optimal risk-sharing contract and show that it can be implemented with a fairly straightforward mechanism--a least-present-value-of-revenue...