This paper considers the effects of refinery outages (due to planned turn-arounds or un-planned events) on current petroleum product prices and future refinery investment. Empirical evidence on these relationships is mixed and highly dependent on the size and duration of the outage, the geographic area considered, the level of inventories available at the time of the outage, and the tightness of the market as measured by the capacity utilization rate. Using a de-tailed database of plant-level refinery outages for both upstream and downstream refining units, I estimate the effects of outages...

Efforts to understand the relationship between market structure and the quality of health services are complicated by non-random character of patients choices of where to recieve care. To address this problem, I construct an empirical model of helath outcomes for dialysis patients that accounts for the endogenous selection of which facility patients choose to recieve treatment from. The models estimates of facilities average quality are robust to both unobservable variation in condition severity and heterogeneous responses to different facilities treatment regims

Increased competition from the Internet has raised a concern of product quality for online prescription drugs. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibits the importation of unapproved drugs into the US and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) emphasizes their illegality and cites examples of unsafe drugs from rogue pharmacies. An investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that Google was allowing unapproved Canadian pharmacies to advertise on their search engine and target US consumers. Because of heightened concern to protect consumers, Google agreed to...

We compare the private and social incentives for privacy when sellers can commit to transparent privacy policies that are understood by consumers. The purpose is to establish a baseline for how well markets perform when privacy policies are common knowledge.