In a recent article surveying electricity demand studies, Lester Taylor examined the implications of multistep block pricing for consumption. The framework he used serves here as the basis for comparing lifeline rates, fuel stamps, and direct cash subsidies -- programs proposed to alleviate the...

Utility prices that are made to respond appropriately to adventitious variations in demand or supply can produce substantial improvement in the efficiency of utilization of utility facilities, raising load factors and lowering average costs. More effective and less disruptive handling of...

In the 1930's and 1940's, the view came to be held that the right policy was to make public utility prices everywhere equal to marginal cost, even where marginal cost was less than average cost and a government subsidy was required to maintain production. This policy proposal had serious...

Within the context of a mean-variance equilibrium model of the pricing of capital assets, this paper investigates the allocation of investment in new risky opportunities which results from the collective behavior of firms, each of which attempts to maximize the net increase in its market value....

The economic literature on the prospects for cable television in the nation's major television markets is universally pessimistic. The conventional wisdom, as expressed by Park and Mitchell in the pages of this Journal, is that cable systems will not be able to enroll many subscribers in areas...

This paper reexamines a familiar problem in the literature of transportation economics: the impact of ICC rate regulation on the allocation of surface freight traffic among competing modes. A multinomial logit model is used to estimate the division of traffic manufactured commodities among...

Training on the job, an important element in the formation of human capital, is a particularly promising objective of government policy for the disadvantaged who, because they require a variety of special services and arrangements, are costly to employ initially. Presently, under the NAB-JOBS...

This paper reviews a number of cost studies conducted by the Cost Finding Section of the ICC purporting to show that the elasticity of total railroad costs with respect to output (percent variable) is 0.8.

Two extensions are provided to a model of lumpy investment originally formulated by Srinivasan. The extensions are provided in the context of an electric utility. The first extension shows the effect on optimal cycle time and investment size of constraining an electric utility to carry excess...

This paper considers the implications of bankruptcies, take-overs, and divergent expectations for the financial policy of the firm; we argue that, under reasonable assumptions, there is an optimal debt-equity ratio. Previous studies have shown that under very general conditions, if there is no...