This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (sbtc) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of sbtc that determines sbtc's...

This paper presents several techniques for recovering cost function estimates for electricity generation from a model of optimal bidding behavior in a competitive electricity market. Two techniques are developed based on different models of the price-setting process in a competitive electricity...

This paper proposes a simple two-step estimation method (Climate Adaptive Response Estimation - CARE) to estimate sectoral climate damage functions, which account for long- run adaptation. The paper applies this method in the context of residential electricity and natural gas demand for the...

Adoption of real-time electricity pricing -- retail prices that vary hourly to reflect changing wholesale prices -- removes existing cross-subsidies to those customers that consume disproportionately more when wholesale prices are highest. If their losses are substantial, these customers are...

We examine the bidding behavior of firms competing on ERCOT, the hourly electricity balancing market in Texas. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding into this uniform-price divisible-good auction market. Using detailed firm-level data on bids and marginal costs of generation, we find...

Estimating market power is often complicated by the lack of reliable measures of marginal cost. Instead, policy-makers often rely on other summary statistics of the market, thought to be correlated with price cost margins---such as concentration ratios or the HHI. In many industries, these...

This paper examines how much carbon emissions from the electricity industry would decrease in response to a carbon price. We show how both carbon prices and cheap natural gas reduce, in a nearly identical manner, the historic cost advantage of coal-fired power plants. The shale revolution has...

Legislation often empowers agencies to develop rules, but legal challenges may create uncertainty, thereby increasing firm costs, delaying policy objectives, and affecting externalities. This paper investigates policy uncertainty surrounding the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, estimating a...

We study 114 years of U.S. stock market data and find That there are large cohort effects in stock prices, effects that we label 'organization capital,' That cohort effects grew at a rate of 1.75% per year, That the debt-equity ratio of all vintages declined, That three big technological waves...

Using revised, updated, and consistent annual post-World War II data from the G-7 countries developed by us, we econometrically estimate and test alternative explanations of the structure of economic growth in a model with three inputs tangible capital, labor, and human capital which permits the...