The success of airline deregulation challenged the claims of public choice theory, which asserts that regulation serves the purposes of the regulated firms themselves. One prominent explanation for airline deregulation is that "political entrepreneurs" can, under certain circumstances, challenge...

This paper addresses the boundaries of firms' voluntary self-regulation in the context of information disclosure laws, a widely used regulatory approach that requires firms to disclose otherwise private information, reducing information asymmetries in the hopes that market mechanisms may then...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

Fracking has made America the center of global oil production and the engine of the world’s economy. But haste makes waste. America’s new oil wells are releasing natural gas as well, which is prized as a clean and reliable fuel around the world, but must be simply burned off or “flared”...

We analyze how information disclosure policy affects investment efficiency in non-cooperative settings with information externalities. In a two-firm, two-period model, we characterize equilibrium behavior under policies which disclose whether investment returns exceed a predefined level. These...

The US Clean Air Act allows individual states to implement their own clean fuel programs to address local or regional air quality concerns. These regulations have led to a proliferation of fuel blends known as "boutique fuels." For each of the three grades of gasoline, more than 15 types of...

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...

Motivated by policy events experienced during the last two decades by the European natural gas industry, this paper develops a simple model for analyzing the interaction between gas release and capacity investment programs as tools to improve the performance of imperfectly competitive markets....

Resumen Los ministros Néstor Luis Pérez (1936-1938) y Manuel Rafael Egaña (1938-1941 y 1949) en el gobierno de López Contreras (1936-1941) hicieron importantes contribuciones al desarrollo del marco institucional petrolero después de muerte de Gómez en diciembre de 1935. La gestión de...

The restructuring of the Spanish oil industry produced a highly concentrated oligopoly in the retail gasoline market. In June 1990 the Spanish government introduced a system of ceiling price regulation in order to ensure that "liberalization" was accompanied by adequate consumer protection. This...