This paper investigates the sources for regulatory delay in bureaucratic decision making, testing regulatory capture, congressional dominance, and bureaucratic discretion theories of agency behavior. The empirical context concerns relicenses issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission...

Policy shocks affect the rent distribution in long-term contracts, which can lead to such contracts being renegotiated. We seek an understanding of what aspects of contract design, in the face of a substantial policy shock, affect the propensity to renegotiate. We test our hypotheses using data...

In an earlier paper (Kosnik, 2008), the potential for small scale hydro-power to contribute to U.S. renewable energy supplies, as well as reduce current carbon emissions, was investigated. It was discovered that thousands of viable sites capable of producing significant amounts of hydroelectric...

The leading cause of climate change today is the burning of fossil fuels related to energy production. One approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, therefore, is to more actively switch to proven renewable technologies in the production of electricity, and reduce the use of fossil fuels in...

The use and prevalence of JEL code categorization is wide in the field of economics, but what do JEL code classifications actually tell us? And are they used with consistency by academics in the field? Utilizing a dataset of articles published in the American Economic Review from 1990-2008, we...

In this paper we investigate whether academic research attention to certain public policy related measures (including unemployment, inflation, bankruptcies, and GDP) is correlated with empirical measurements of the measures themselves. In other words, when unemployment rises, does academic...

This paper presents the results of a text based exploratory study of over 20,000 academic articles published in seven top research journals from 1960-2010. The goal is to investigate the general research foci of economists over the last fifty years, how (if at all) they have changed over time,...

There is a tradeoff that must be addressed any time a contract is written; whether or not to make a contract flexible but incomplete or rigid but comprehensive. This paper investigates the completeness of hydroelectric license contracts over a nearly three decade time span and finds that as...