Measuring the Dynamic Efficiency Costs of Regulators' Preferences: Municipal Water Utilities in the Arid West
发现美国西部城市水务公司定价远低于边际成本，导致地下水过度开采和社会福利损失；通过估计管理者目标函数和反事实实验，测算了定价折扣造成的无谓损失并恢复了有效定价政策。
Evidence suggests that municipal water utility administrators in the western US price water significantly below its marginal cost and, in so doing, inefficiently exploit aquifer stocks and induce social surplus losses. This paper empirically identifies the objective function of those managers, measures the deadweight losses resulting from their price-discounting decisions, and recovers the efficient water pricing policy function from counterfactual experiments. In doing so, the estimation uses a "continuous-but-constrained- control" version of a nested fixed-point algorithm in order to measure the important intertemporal consequences of groundwater pricing decisions.