The increasing importance of intermittent renewable energy sources suggests a growing importance for energy storage as a way of smoothing the variable output. In this paper I investigate factors affecting the amount of energy storage needed, including the degree of intermittency and the...

We present and test an explanation for lags in the adjustment of wholesale gasoline prices to changes in crude oil prices. Our simple model with costly adjustment of production and inventories implies that output prices will respond with a lag to cost shocks even in the absence of menu costs,...

Burning coal is known to have environmental costs; this paper quantities the local environmental costs of transporting and storing coal at U.S. power plants for the sample period 2002-2012. We first demonstrate that a 10% increase in coal stockpiles (number of deliveries) results in a 0.07%...

Entrepôts are hubs that facilitate trade between multiple origins and destinations. We study these entrepôts, the network they form, and their impact on international trade. We document that the trade network is a hub-and-spoke system, where 80% of trade is shipped indirectly--nearly all via...

In this chapter we draw from existing literature and a range of statistics to describe economic, entrepreneurial and innovative activities in the transportation and warehousing sector of the U.S. economy. We suggest multiple avenues for future work, and argue for more research on the role of...

Network planning models, which forecast the profitability of airline schedules, support many critical decisions, including equipment purchase decisions. Network planning models include an itinerary choice model that is used to allocate air total demand in a city pair to different itineraries....

This paper documents three new stylized facts showing that truckers in Colombia frequently choose to make complex chains of shipments in a single trip before returning home. It then provides a newmodel of optimal trucker trip-chaining with a general geography that is consistent with these facts

This paper studies the within-model-year pricing and production of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that for the typical new vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.2 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump...

This note explains the diverging trends between real and nominal aggregate inventory-sales ratios. The combined effect of two features of the data explains the divergence. First, while aggregate sales include both goods and services, inventories include only goods. Second, there has been a...

Recent papers by Kim and Nelson (1999) and McConnell and Perez-Quiros (2000) uncover a dramatic decline in the volatility of U.S. GDP growth beginning in 1984. Determining whether the source is good luck, good policy or better inventory management has since developed into an active area of...