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Farmers and politicians in North Dakota and nearby states claim that dramatic increases in shipments of crude oil by rail in 2013–14 caused service delays and higher costs. We investigate t...

Policies supporting investment in renewable electricity have been a cornerstone of climate policy in many parts of the world. While previous empirical work explores the economic and environ...

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is among the largest renewable energy mandates in the world. The policy is enforced using tradeable credits that implicitly subsidize biofuels and tax foss...

California’s cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gasses (GHG) began in 2013. An important feature of the California trading system was its allowance price-containment policies, intended to limit th...

The imposition of environmental regulations to domestic manufacturing traditionally creates concerns over the impacts of those regulations on international competition and downstream product prices. The US nitrogen fertilizer industry has been considered by conventional metrics to be one of the most vulnerable to such effects. Since 2010 the industry has undergone increased concentration of producers and a dramatic reduction in natural gas prices. Our research establishes that the pass-through of changes in prices to domestic natural gas declined from 80% prior to 2010 to effectively zero through 2014. One implication of this change in pricing dynamics is that the imposition of greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations on producers of nitrogen fertilizers would have little impact on fertilizer prices. Within the context of a GHG cap-and-trade program, the allocation of emissions allowances would likely result in a transfer to fertilizer producers on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars with no impa...