Understanding the sensitivity of gasoline demand to changes in prices and income has important implications for policies related to climate change, optimal taxation and national security, to name only a few. While the short-run price and income elasticities of gasoline demand in the United...

We study price convergence between the two major markets for wholesale electricity in California from their deregulation in April 1998 through November 2000, nearly the end of trading in one market. We would expect profit-maximizing traders to have eliminated persistent price differences between...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic...

Incompatibility in markets with indirect network effects can affect prices if consumers value "mix and match" combinations of complementary network components. In this paper, we examine the effects of incompatibility using data from a classic market with indirect network effects: Automated...

Estimating market power is often complicated by the lack of reliable measures of marginal cost. Instead, policy-makers often rely on other summary statistics of the market, thought to be correlated with price cost margins---such as concentration ratios or the HHI. In many industries, these...

A low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by limiting a fuel producer's carbon emissions per unit of output. California has launched an LCFS for transportation fuels; others have called for a national LCFS. We show that this policy decreases production of...

Renewable fuel standards, low carbon fuel standards, and ethanol subsidies are popular policies to incentivize ethanol production and reduce emissions from transportation. Compared to carbon trading, these policies lead to large shifts in agricultural activity and unexpected social costs. We...

Many consumers are keenly aware of gasoline prices, and consumer responses to gasoline prices have been well studied. In this paper, by contrast, we investigate how gasoline prices affect the automobile industry: manufacturers and dealerships. We estimate how changes in gasoline prices affect...

From 1864 to 1972, the real price of oil fell by, on average, over one percent per year. This trend dramatically broke when prices for crude increased by over 650 percent from 1972 to 1980. Policy makers adopted several policies designed to keep oil prices in check and reduce consumption....