Search Results for: boutique fuel

Obsolete Boutique Fuels and Failure to Arbitrage

Lynne Kiesling Andy Morriss (Univ. of Alabama Law School) and Don Boudreaux (George Mason University) have an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, A Coca-Cola Solution to High Gas Prices. The punch line: environmental fuel formulation regulations balkanize wholesale fuel markets and make prices more volatile as a consequence. This is not a new …

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Two New Reports on the Boutique Fuel Problem

Lynne Kiesling Last week while I was off philosophizing, the Federal Trade Commission released a new report on the factors that influence retail gasoline prices (hat tip to Todd Zywicki). The FTC watches retail gasoline prices carefully, and every spring like clockwork when prices go up and my Senator (that would be Dick Durbin) rails …

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Can We Finally Get the Ethanol Mandate Monkey off of Our Backs?

Lynne Kiesling This summer, corn prices are high. Drought, extreme weather, and other factors combine to increase corn prices, and one of those factors is the federal ethanol mandate/renewable fuels requirement implemented over 20 years ago (as an oxygenate requirement) and extended in 2005. Roger Pielke Jr. points to a Purdue research paper that suggests …

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Fundamentals of Spring Gasoline Price Increases

Lynne Kiesling The following is a post I wrote in March 2004 about the regular, annual, seasonal rise in gasoline prices that always occurs at this time of year. I am reposting it here because it generally still applies, and I am inserting some updated comments in bold below. Being systematic, here are the primary …

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Virginia Postrel’s written a must-read Economic Scene column in today’s New York Times. Its topic is specialization, and specifically the move away from vertical integration in the structure of many industries. Technological change has contributed to making this move possible and profitable. There’s a large field in new institutional economics that explores precisely this dynamic. …

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Virginia Postrel’s written a must-read Economic Scene column in today’s New York Times. Its topic is specialization, and specifically the move away from vertical integration in the structure of many industries. Technological change has contributed to making this move possible and profitable. There’s a large field in new institutional economics that explores precisely this dynamic. …

Read More »

Virginia Postrel’s written a must-read Economic Scene column in today’s New York Times. Its topic is specialization, and specifically the move away from vertical integration in the structure of many industries. Technological change has contributed to making this move possible and profitable. There’s a large field in new institutional economics that explores precisely this dynamic. …

Read More »