The last thirty years have witnessed a fundamental change in the regulation of infrastructure industries. Whereas firms were subject to rate of return regulation and protected from entry in the past now they face various forms of incentive regulation competition is actively promoted by many...

Generators supplying electricity markets are subject to volatile input and output prices and uncertain fuel availability. Price-risk may be hedged to a considerable extent but fuel-risk - water flows in the case of hydro and gas availability in the case of thermal plants - may not be. We show...

Cooperatives and mutual organisational forms arise for reasons which include contracting problems between parties. Economic literature suggests a variety of allocated inefficiencies implied by these forms that largely have their origins in poor investment decisions. We demonstrate that a...

Graeme Guthrie and Steen Videbeck presented, Is New Zealand One Market or Many? Implications for Locational Portfolios at an ISCR half day seminar in September 2003.

We analyze the optimal hedging policy of a firm that has flexibility in the timing of investment. Conventional wisdom suggests that hedging adds value by alleviating the underinvestment problem associated with capital market frictions. However our model shows that hedging also adds value by...

We consider the effect of carbon subsidies and taxes in the form of carbon credit allocations on forest owners' land use and harvest decisions. We introduce three possible credit allocation regimes: one where credits are allocated according to the annual flow of carbon another where annual...

Graeme Guthrie presented Incentive Regulation: Asset Valuation and Investment in Advance at the Contemporary Issues in Regulatory Theory and Practice half day workshop held in Wellington in March 2005.

The major difficulties in assessing market power in electricity wholesale spot markets mean that great weight should be placed upon assessing market outcomes against the fundamental determinants of supply demand and competition. In this spirit we study whether the New Zealand market has been a...

We present a new adjustment rule for interrupted cricket matches that equalizes the probability of winning before and after the interruption. Our proposal differs from existing rules in the quantity preserved (the probability of winning) and also in the point at which it is measured (the time of...

An increasing number of researchers attempt to model the behavior of electricity spot prices using statistical models commonly used to model financial asset prices. In this paper we reveal properties of electricity spot prices which such models cannot capture. Using six years of half-hourly...