While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many U.S. electric...

Despite the popularity of price cap regulation in practice, the economic literature provides relatively little guidance on how to determine the X factor, which is the rate at which inflation -adjusted output prices must fall under price cap plans. We review the standard principles that inform...

Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. The Smart Grid is a set of emerging technologies that, among other effects, will facilitate "real-time pricing" for electricity and increase price...

Regulating bidder participation in auctions can potentially increase efficiency compared to standard auction formats with free entry. We show that the relative performance of two such mechanisms, a standard first-price auction with free entry and an entry rights auction, depends...

We investigate the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on the Indian organized manufacturing sector using enterprise data. The GQ project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. We use a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to compare non-nodal...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

As the clearinghouses for a major portion of the world's rapidly increasing international trade flows, ocean ports and the efficiency with which they process cargo have become an ever more important topic. Yet, there exist very little data that allows one to compare port efficiency measures of...

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...

Recent advances in information technology (IT) have enabled firms in many industries to give middle managers new access to timely production data. Process monitoring' technologies give distant managers a window to production which can both lower their cost of monitoring subordinates and provide...