Federal clean air regulations have spawned a proliferation of motor fuel types that have created differentiated markets for motor fuels, increased the cost of supplying these fuels, and reduced the capacity of the supply infrastructure. In this paper we examine wholesale gasoline prices in 99 US...

Investment opportunities in electric power generation have changed dramatically since electricity industry restructuring first began. In contrast to regulated utilities adding capacity in line with central planning and regulation, power plant investment is now more often made by independent...

The refining industry has changed over the past decades from one in which petroleum refining capacity primarily served local and regional markets to one in which trade in refined petroleum products has become more widespread. We investigate the hypothesis of increasing globalization by examining...

Low ethanol prices relative to the price of gasoline blendstock, and tax credits, have resulted in discretionary blending at wholesale terminals of ethanol into fuel supplies above required levels---a practice known as ethanol splashing in industry parlance. No one knows precisely where or in...

We examine the rate of motion-picture piracy across a sample of 26 diverse countries. The level of piracy is explained empirically by the level of income, the cost of enforcing property rights, the level of collectivism present in a country's social institution and the level of internet usage....

China's rapidly rising crude oil consumption has been a cause of concern, both for China's own energy security and the effects this rising demand has on world oil markets. However, one must disaggregate the domestic Chinese demand for petroleum products to reveal what sort of policy options...

Are motion picture audiences influenced by box office reports? Do they `herd' after the leaders and ignore possibly better but less popular films? How important is a big opening to the revenue a film eventually earns? This paper develops a dynamical learning model of motion picture demand that...

In this paper we use nonparametric statistical tools to quantify motion-picture profit. We quantify the unconditional distribution of profit, the distribution of profit conditional on stars and sequels, and we also model the conditional expectation of movie profits using a nonparametric...

We argue in this paper that economics of financial market liquidity---and not the establishment of market power---led firms in the electricity business to choose holding companies as their preferred form of organization. Our empirical analysis shows that the holding company form of organization...

This research presents a systematic empirical analysis of the market for digital versatile discs (DVDs). We examine a sample of 953 DVD titles that appeared on the weekly top-30 sales charts in North America over a 30-month interval. We find that the size distribution of weekly DVD sales revenue...