It is now plausible to envision scenarios in which global demand for crude oil falls to essentially zero by the end of this century, driven by improvements in clean energy technologies, adoption of stringent climate policies, or both. This paper asks what such a demand decline, when anticipated,...

Output-based carbon regulations--such as fuel economy standards and the rate-based standards in the Clean Power Plan--create well-known incentives to inefficiently increase output. Similar distortions are created by attribute-based regulations. This paper demonstrates that, despite these...

We document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This correlation could represent transmission of brand preferences across generations, or it could result from correlation in family...

This paper discusses contributions that industrial organization economists have made to our understanding of energy markets and environmental regulation. We emphasize the substantive contributions of recent papers while also highlighting how this literature has adopted and sometimes augmented...

Oil and gas leases between mineral owners and extraction firms ubiquitously include royalty and primary term clauses. The royalty denotes the share of revenue that is paid to the mineral owner, and the primary term specifies the date by which the firm must complete a well, lest it lose the...

We categorize the primary incentive-based mechanisms under consideration for addressing greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation--pricing carbon, setting intensity standards, and subsidizing clean energy--and compare their market outcomes under similar expansions of clean electricity...

We study how the Jones Act -- a 100-year-old U.S. regulation that constrains domestic waterborne shipping -- affects U.S. markets for crude oil and petroleum products. We collect data on U.S. Gulf Coast and East Coast fuel prices, movements, and consumption, and we estimate domestic non-Jones...

Technological innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have enabled tremendous amounts of natural gas to be extracted profitably from underground shale formations that were long thought to be uneconomical. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of broad-scale welfare...

Energy price pass-through receives a lot of academic attention, for several reasons: energy prices can be highly volatile, they impact every consumer and every industry in the economy, and they are frequently impacted by regulations including gas taxes and carbon regulations. Like the...

Economists, energy experts, and policymakers have called for accelerating investment in the U.S. electricity transmission network. Additional transmission lines could better integrate markets, reducing the total cost of electricity generation. They could also allow for the better integration of...