This paper studies the impact of the March 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) accident on the regulation of nuclear power plants (NPPs) and its consequences for the operating behavior and profitability of the U.S. nuclear power industry. We treat the TMI accident as a ``natural experiment'' that...

This paper presents a dynamic programming (DP) model of an electric utility's optimal policy for operating a nuclear power plant (NPP). The utility chooses the level of capacity utilization of the NPP as a function of signals about the NPP's current operating state. In each period the utility...

The authors present an empirical model of optimal operation of nuclear power plants. The optimal lifetime is the solution to an optimal stopping problem: the plant is closed when the expected discounted losses from continued operation exceed the discounted costs of decommissioning. The authors...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans, annuities, and health insurance. Using data from the Retirement History Survey, we estimate a detailed...

This paper introduces random versions of successive approximations and multigrid algorithms for computing approximate solutions to a class of finite and infinite horizon Markovian decision problems (MDPs). We prove that these algorithms succeed in breaking the curse of dimensionality for a...