The U.S. shale boom has profoundly increased crude oil movements by both pipelines–the traditional mode of transportation–and railroads. This paper develops a model of how pipeline investment and railroad use are determined in equilibrium, emphasizing how railroads' flexibility allows them...

What are the implications of gasoline price volatility for the design of fuel economy policies? I show that this problem has a strong parallel to Weitzman's (1974) classic model of using price or quantity controls to regulate an externality. Changes in fuel prices act as shocks to the marginal...

Output-based carbon regulations — such as fuel economy standards and the rate-based standards in the Clean Power Plan — create well-known incentives to inefficiently increase output. Similar distortions are created by attribute-based regulations. This paper demonstrates that, despite these...

Beginning in early 2011, crude oil production in the U.S. Midwest and Canada surpassed the pipeline capacity to transport it to the Gulf Coast where it could access the world oil market. As a result, the U.S. "benchmark" crude oil price in Cushing, Oklahoma, declined substantially relative to...

A full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices. We provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the Michigan...

The largest group of foreign students currently in the United States comes from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). According to a 1993 UC Berkeley survey (Zweig and Chen, 1995), the percentage of Chinese students planning to eventually return home was 33%. However in the past decade this...