The impending demise of petrodollar-supported capitalist Islamism, the failures of which begat 21st century terrorist Islamism, incentivizes the Muslim middle class and timocracies to find another outlet for Muslim liberation theology. This amplifies manifold the risks (and potential, but limited, benefits) of “Islamic finance.”
In an economy with heterogeneous firms and heterogeneous consumers, the authors describe a general equilibrium where firm equity is priced by a supply and demand process. With a model robust to arbitrary, nonlinear tax functions, they investigate the efficiency of replacing the current U.S. tax regime with a policy of no corporate taxes and taxation of capital distributions to the household at progressive personal income tax rates.
Texas' ERCOT ISO is used as a model for examining the costs of replacing fossil fuels by wind generation and storage, and for comparing wind power with generation based on nuclear and storage.
The unfettered development of Houston's flood-prone areas undoubtedly magnified the tremendous damage caused by Hurricane Harvey, but zoning or other land use controls are unpopular on the Texas coast and are unlikely to be adopted as a result. With this in mind, the SSPEED Center at Rice University looked to innovation and the market system to find a creative solution to protect important natural, flood-prone areas from further development.
The authors investigate two plausible causes for the significant price discount of U.S. crudes during the U.S. “shale boom” and evaluate how much each mattered.
The authors analyzed more than 10,000 legislative documents from Morocco's parliament to determine if legislative priorities were in line with those of the public. "We found a substantial level of issue congruence between the priorities of the [political] elites and citizens," they concluded.
In the early 2000s, the Inter-American Development Bank conducted a series of analyses evaluating the role of key actors in the public policymaking process in eight Latin American countries — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela.
This working paper reviews the degree to which these eight country-level analyses still accurately portray the actors and their present-day roles in the policymaking process.
This paper examines the cash flow and financial issues affecting Venezuela’s PDVSA, as well as the operational challenges facing the country’s oil industry.
Igor Hernández, Francisco J. MonaldiNovember 18, 2016
This working paper analyzes three key factors that characterize the “new normal” of China’s oil demand: slowing overall demand growth, gasoline replacing diesel as the demand driver, and a substantial rise in refined products exports.