A sufficiently rapidly rising carbon tax may increase near-term emissions compared with the case of no carbon tax. Even so, such a carbon tax path may reduce total costs related to climate change, since the tax may reduce total carbon extraction. A government cannot commit to a specific carbon...

When natural gas prices are subject to periodic decoupling from oil prices, for instance due to peak-load pricing, conventional linear models of price dynamics such as the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) can lead to erroneous inferences about cointegration relationships, price adjustments...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l’environnement encompass...

I extend multi-unit auction estimation techniques to a setting in which firms can express cost complementarities over time. In the context of electricity markets, I show how the auction structure and bidding data can be used to estimate these complementarities, which in these markets arise due...

A finite number of sellers (n) compete in schedules to supply an elastic demand. The costs of the sellers have uncertain common and private value components and there is no exogenous noise in the system. A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized; the equilibrium is privately...

A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized in a market where firms have private information about their uncertain costs. It is found that with supply function competition, and in contrast to Bayesian Cournot competition, competitiveness is affected by the parameters of the...

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We...

The paper analyzes the relationship between CO2 mitigation policy and promotion policies designed to deploy renewable energy sources for electricity production (RES-E). If an emission cap is the only policy target, an optimal mix consisting of high and low carbon use of fossil fuels, deployment...

Using recent advances in panel data estimation techniques, we find that an appreciation of the US dollar exchange rate leads to a significant decline in oil demand for a sample of 65 oil-importing countries. The estimated effect turns out to be much larger than the impact of a shift in the...

Natural gas is likely to become increasingly important in the future. Understanding the stochastic underpinnings of natural gas prices will be critical, both to policy analysts and to market participants. To this end, we investigate the potential presence of jumps in natural gas spot prices in...