AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 12, December 2001
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
By September 2000 utilities were paying nearly three times as much for power in the wholesale market as they could charge at retail.
California's electric industry restructuring and competition program has encountered numerous setbacks and difficulties but NBER Research Associate Paul Joskow uncovers important lessons from the recent debacle. The problems, he writes, were not inherent with deregulation but rather with the way California implemented its reforms plus "a...
Article
A portfolio strategy based on purchasing shares in companies with the strongest investor protections and selling short those firms with the greatest management power earned an abnormal return of 8.5 percent a year.
Corporate raiders. Hostile takeovers. Poison pills. Golden parachutes. Deal mania in the 1980s drove many managements at established companies to erect steep barriers to unwanted suitors, especially from financial engineers brilliant at exploiting the power...
Article
Each rise in the inflation rate was met by an even larger rise in the nominal interest rate. This kept the inflation rate from being volatile, for the more the Fed responds to inflationary pressures, the less problematic inflation becomes, and the less the Fed has to respond to later.
In U.S. Monetary Policy in the 1990s (NBER Working Paper No. 8471), NBER Research Associate Gregory Mankiw analyzes the degree to which the monetary policies of Federal Reserve Chairman...
Article
To the extent that the goal of public policy is to increase the utilization of health care services among the self-employed, providing them with health insurance subsidies may not be an efficacious measure.
Some 81 percent of wage-earners in the United States are covered by health insurance. But in 1996 only 68 percent of the self-employed under age 63 had health insurance. The remaining 32 percent were among the approximately 44.2 million Americans, or 16 percent of...