The great housing convulsion that buffeted America between 2000 and 2010 has historical precedents, from the frontier land boom of the 1790s to the skyscraper craze of the 1920s. But this time was different. There was far less real uncertainty about fundamental economic and geographic trends, making the convulsion even more puzzling. During historic and recent booms, sensible models could justify high prices on the basis of seemingly reasonable projections about stable or growing prices. The recurring error appears to be a failure to anticipate the impact that elastic supply will eventually have on prices, whether for cotton in Alabama in 1820 or land in Las Vegas in 2006. Buyers don't appear to be irrational but rather cognitively limited investors who work with simple heuristic models, instead of a comprehensive general equilibrium framework. Low interest rates rarely seem to drive price growth; underpriced default options are a more common contributor to high prices. The primary cost of booms has not typically been overbuilding, but rather the financial chaos that accompanies housing downturns.

The history of natural gas wellhead and pipeline regulation, deregulation and regulatory reforms are discussed. These reforms brought natural gas shortages and pipeline inefficiencies to an end. They also created an economic platform that could support unanticipated developments in the supply and costs of domestic natural gas. Such unanticipated developments emerged in the last few years as several technological innovations came together to make it commercially attractive to development US shale gas deposits located deep in the earth. How and why shale gas supplies will lead to dramatic changes in the United States' energy future with appropriate environmental regulatory reforms are discussed.

A large and growing share of world trade travels by air. We model exporters' choice between fast, expensive air cargo and slow, cheap ocean cargo, which depends on the price elasticity of demand and the value that consumers attach to fast delivery. We use US imports data that provide rich variation in the premium paid for air shipping and in time lags for ocean transit to extract consumers' valuation of time. We estimate that each day in transit is equivalent to an advalorem tariff of 0.6 to 2.1 percent. The most time-sensitive trade flows involve parts and components trade.

A long line of research investigates whether the retail prices of electricity and natural gas send proper signals about scarcity in order to induce efficient consumption. Historically, regulated utilities have not designed tariffs that set marginal prices equal to marginal costs. Currently, some jurisdictions are opening the retail sectors to competition via “retail choice.” These new regimes replace imperfect regulation with imperfect competition as the process by which retail tariffs are formed. We discuss the challenges in evaluating the efficiency of tariffs and present evidence of how pricing has changed in markets with retail choice.

We model retail-price recommendations (RPRs) as a communication device in vertical supply relations with private manufacturer information on production costs and consumer demand. With static trade, RPRs are irrelevant, and the equilibrium outcome is inefficient. With repeated trade, RPRs can become part of a relational contract, communicating private information from manufacturer to retailer that is indispensable for maximizing joint surplus. We show that this contract is self-enforcing if the retailer's profit is independent of production costs and punishment strategies are chosen appropriately. The predictions of our analysis are consistent with the available empirical evidence.

An individual who takes an HIV test can be informed about their own status and risk. Similarly, when friends, family or neighbors learn of a person's HIV status, they may update their beliefs about HIV infection among people they know. Using an experiment conducted in rural Malawi which randomly assigned incentives to learn HIV results, we find that as people in the community learn their HIV results, individuals revise their beliefs downward about deaths attributable to HIV/AIDS. We find corresponding behavioral responses with a significant decrease in condom use and no significant increase in multiple partnerships among those who are HIV-negative.