IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aen/journl/1994v15-03-a01.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Hotelling Principle and In-Ground Values of Oil Reserves: Why the Principle Over-Predicts Actual Values

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen L. McDonald

Abstract

Two articles previously published in this Journal (Watkins 1992 and Adelman 1993) reported that the valuation version of the Hotelling Principle over-predicts in-ground values of oil and gas reserves by a factor of approximately two. This paper shows these results are to be expected once it is understood that: (1) the Principle assumes individual operators have the effective freedom to schedule extraction rates so as to make net prices rise at the rate of discount, regardless of the course of gross (wellhead) prices; and (2) the long-prevailing system of regulating oil well spacing and extraction rates in the United States and Canada, designed to deal with the common pool problem, effectively denies operators that freedom. The discrepancy between actual in-ground values and those predicted by the Hotelling Principle suggests the benefits to be had by substituting compulsory reservoir unitization cum manager freedom for the current system of regulation.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen L. McDonald, 1994. "The Hotelling Principle and In-Ground Values of Oil Reserves: Why the Principle Over-Predicts Actual Values," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3), pages 1-18.
    • Handle: RePEc:aen:journl:1994v15-03-a01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1166
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Davis, Graham A. & Moore, David J., 1998. "Valuing mineral reserves when capacity constrains production," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 121-125, July.
    2. Wang, Qiao & Balvers, Ronald, 2021. "Determinants and predictability of commodity producer returns," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F0 - International Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aen:journl:1994v15-03-a01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David Williams (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iaeeeea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.