Jeff Gordon
@jeffgordon
Tax law, industrial policy, decarbonization, between state and market in American law. Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
I'd like to think more on when to deploy the symmetrical tools vs the asymmetric ones, and I expect to spend some more time with your IDR idea in future projects. I really like this mission statement and am glad you think it fits with the goal of this paper.
For better or worse, this paper is meant to deal with a very specific set of industries, including by definition only fairly competitive ones. I pulled some data on HHI concentration to confirm that the ones I discuss are relatively unconcentrated:
Cobweb industries produce graphs like this one, from Greenwood & Hanson (2015), where price and supply additions are continuously oscillating out of phase with each other. You can see the same graph in oil, LNG, lithium, polysilicon, commercial real estate, cattle, and more.
This is the prediction of the old-school cobweb model, developed in the 1930s but still highly relevant today. The hallmark of a cobweb industry is a lag between deciding to invest in new capacity and that capacity actually coming online.
The 2008 GFC made Minsky's financial instability hypothesis famous. The various post-COVID supply chain crises suggest an "investment instability hypothesis." Boom times motivate overinvestment, which crashes prices, which leads to underinvestment, which causes price to spike...
Remarkable graph from Berkeley Lab's annual report on solar deployment (through 2023). PPA prices have closely tracked the cost of electricity, suggesting very low profit margins for merchant generators. Tempting to call it cost of service regulation.
Amazing opportunity for a creative litigator with interests in private law to break into legal academia and work with one of the smartest and most generous mentors imaginable (Daniel Markovits)
Extremely @nathantankus.bsky.social / @lookheron.bsky.social style report on the administrative complexity of lithium pricing. There is supply and demand if you zoom out far enough, but not sufficient to describe what's going on in the details. www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-con...
Though, I don't fully understand why credit spreads rise when utilities can pass through price volatility to customers. The citation is to something generic, not industry specific.
Why do we need to derisk investment in renewables? Because moving to renewables (here, exploiting variation in RPS) raises electric price volatility, which widens credit spreads. Better storage will mitigate the volatility, but price-smoothing policy can help too. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Powerful slides from NextEra, via @zeitlin.bsky.social. New solar + storage is just beating new gas.
Here are the top contractors to agencies other than DoD and [blank] (which appears to be defense-related):
USAspending.gov data is amazing. Bet you wouldn't have guessed that United Health eked ahead of Lockheed for contracting in 2024 (mostly for its role as third party administrator of VA community care networks)
I'm excited to share that I'll be starting a new job this summer as assistant professor at Vanderbilt Law School. I couldn't have picked a better set of colleagues to support and challenge my work. I started grad school in 2015--thanks to all who supported me on this long road!
Really? Home ownership looks more or less in the same low-60% range since 1960, whereas average age of Congress has gone way up
This “debate” between Luke and Beth cashes out in whether I read about export controls or modern selfhood next
For me at least, this project has been significantly influenced by @employamerica.bsky.social's work over the past few years. This tweet from @arnabdatta.bsky.social was a lightbulb moment: "we need a policy shift so that abundance is profitable."
Ah yes, the frivolous IRA, wasting money by *checks notes* imposing a tax
Efforts to deny this are quite a stretch. Like suppose you completely agree that Democrats should have attacked greedflation...the IRA recipients were not the firms jacking up food, oil, and rent prices. In normal political discourse, you're allowed to make distinctions between industries...
You didn't know you were looking for a hypnotic double bass-centric jazz album with Celtic and North African influences, but here it is
Fun to see a big company insist that key resources are more reliably managed in public hands!
Completely wild that OECD energy expenditure as % of GDP went from 10% in 2021 to 17% in 2022. Think about how much spare supply you might buy for less than 7% of GDP...
Pleased to see I’m not the only one who appreciates bleak British films about nuclear winter