Michael Giberson It’s been a while since we’ve commented on the secondary market for sports event tickets. Partly, I think, the practice has become legal and common in most circumstances and the on-line markets make the practice more transparent. What was once a seemingly repugnant transaction has been normalized. Or, at least, it is becoming …
Michael Giberson Paul Krugman commented on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and on solar energy the other day. His main thrust is the good news he finds on solar energy, but he detours into a few comments on fracking to generate a charge of political hypocrisy. Fracking is, he says, “a technology that imposes large costs …
Paul Krugman Comments on Hydraulic Fracturing and Solar Power Read More »
Michael Giberson If you think political interference in gasoline markets is excessive, try reading about drug pricing for a while. From the Los Angeles Times: “Shortage of cancer drugs tied to simple economics, experts say.” And by “simple economics” they mean the perverse incentives created by government regulation that induce oncologists to prefer prescribing more …
Michael Giberson From the most recent American Law and Economics Review, “Retail Gasoline Price Ceilings and Regulatory Capture: Evidence from Canada.” The authors find statistical support for the conclusion that “the enactment of [price ceiling] regulation is correlated with a 1–1.2 cents per liter rise in self-service retail gasoline prices, controlling for all else.” They …
Michael Giberson Among U.S. water utilities, some are publicly owned and some are privately owned. Same thing for gas utilities and electric utilities. But unlike in the gas and electric power industries, the water business has become predominantly organized by publicly-owned utilities. Scott Masten explores why it was that public utility ownership became dominant among …
Why Did Water Utilities in the U.S. Become Mostly Publicly Owned? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling This special energy section in today’s New York Times has a lot of interesting articles, especially if you are curious about the business aspects of renewable energy. I particularly learned a lot from the article about control room operators, how they do their jobs, and how they and reliability standards have had to …
Lynne Kiesling A team of highly skilled and design-savvy engineers have revealed Nest, an elegant, well-designed thermostat that can learn your preferred settings, analyze your data to spot energy-saving and money-saving opportunities, and look lovely on your wall. Earth2Tech has a review article on Nest, as does Greentech Enterprise. This summary description, from the Earth2Tech …
Nest’s Elegant Learning Thermostat — but is It Transactive? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of two prominent executives performing sound public choice analyses, and I think they complement each other, at least in my work! This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Exelon’s John Rowe, A Life in Energy and (Therefore) Politics. Exelon is the third largest investor-owned utility/generation owner in …
Exelon’s John Rowe and Google’s Eric Schmidt: Truth to Power? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I first saw this outstanding short video a few weeks ago at the Students for Liberty Chicago conference. It does an excellent job of capturing recent data on economic performance and on economic freedom from the recently-released Economic Freedom of the World report that I discussed in late September. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4fWQnguR1E] In particular, the …
Video: Recent Data on Economic Freedom and Economic Growth Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Steve Horwitz continues to provide excellent focal point arguments about political protests and crony corporatism. In his Freeman column yesterday, he elaborated on the arguments that I developed here earlier in the week and that others have made elsewhere, that the core problem underlying corporate power is its connection to government power: The …
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