Current trends in electricity consumption imply that hundreds of new fossil-fuel power plants will be built in the United States over the next several decades. Power plant siting has become increasingly contentious, in part because power plants are a source of numerous negative local externalities including elevated levels of air pollution, haze, noise and traffic. Policymakers attempt to take ...

In this paper, we propose an explanation for the prominent role of manufacturers in the financing of their own product sales— so called “captive finance.” By lending against their own product as collateral, durable goods manufacturers with market power can commit to restrict production and maintain resale values in future periods, preserving rents today. Using data on captive financing support ...

We investigate the upstream and downstream product-market effects of a large sample of horizontal mergers and acquisitions from 1980 to 1997. We construct a data set that identifies the corporate customers, suppliers, and rivals of the firms initiating horizontal mergers and use this data set to examine announcement-related stock market revaluations and post-merger changes in operating performa...

We investigate observed rent dissipation—the ratio of the total costs seeking to monetary value rent—in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in literature. With concave valuation rent, we find that contests can exhibit over-dissipation if contested is below a threshold yet under-dissipation with large rents: nature implies contestants relat...

This paper investigates the extent of the holdup underinvestment problem in a buyer-seller relationship in which the seller has private information about his alternative trading opportunities. Theory predicts that, compared with a situation in which outside options are publicly observed, the seller obtains an informational rent while the buyer bears an informational loss. As a result the seller...

The impact of strategies used to appropriate innovation rents on firm performance is analyzed using a sample of U.S. public manufacturing firms. Stronger appropriability at the firm level, achieved through patent protection or the ownership of specialized complementary assets, leads to superior economic performance, as measured by the stock market valuation of a firm’s R&D assets. Among commonl...

This paper estimates the welfare costs of the main medium-term options for significantly reducing U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, including carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems applied economy-wide and to the power sector only, and an emissions rate standard for power generation. The key theme is that welfare costs depend importantly on how policies interact with distortio...