Espín-Sánchez Receives Public Utility Resarch Prize for Paper

Assistant Professor José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez and co-author Javier Donna (Ohio State University) were awarded the Public Utility Research Center Prize for the best paper in regulatory economics at the 2016 International Industrial Organization Conference (IIOC). The co-authors’ paper, “The Illiquidity of Water Markets,” shows how the presence of liquidity constraints in farmers can make a market for water inefficient, and discusses under what conditions this would happen and when a system of uniform allocation (quotas) could be more efficient than a market. It is currently under review for publication in Econometrica.
The Public Utility Research Prize is awarded annually to the best paper in regulatory economics, and is selected from all relevant papers that are accepted for presentation at the conference by a committee of experts.
Espín-Sánchez is an Economic Historian with a strong background in economic theory, industrial organization and empirical structural estimation methods. His current work is centered on traditional irrigation communities in Murcia, Spain. Some of the towns in Murcia used auctions to allocate the water from the river while most others allocated the water through fixed quotas. He recovered data from the auction period and used structural estimation techniques to recover the demand parameters. In addition to that he works diverse areas of economic theory such as auction theory, mechanism design, political economy and corporate finance.