Despite the ongoing appetite of financial investors for merchant investments into the European electricity network, the EC is reluctant to approve such undertakings, thus implicitly favoring regulated investments. Based on a two-level model, we analyze the impact of profit-maximizing merchant...

This paper proposes an incentive mechanism for transmission expansion planning. The mechanism is a bilevel program. The upper level is a profit-maximizing transmission company (Transco) which expands its transmission system while endogenously predicts and influences the generation investment....

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs...

This research presents an application of the Hogan, Rosellón and Vogelsang (2010) (HRV) mechanism to promote electricity transmission network expansion in the Peruvian electricity transmission system known as SEIN (Sistema Eléctrico Interconectado Nacional). The HRV mechanism combines the...

We consider a model with two firms operating their individual networks. Each firm can choose its price as well as its investment to build up its network. Assuming a skewed distribution of consumers, our model leads to an asymmetric market structure with one firm choosing higher investments....

This paper provides a productivity analysis of German electricity distribution companies. It addresses both traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence specific to the situation in Germany. Regarding...

This paper presents an application of a mechanism that provides incentives to promote transmission network expansion in the area of the US electric system known as PJM. The applied mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to attract investment into transmission grids. It is...

This paper looks into various models that address strategic behavior in the supply of gas by the Mexican monopoly Pemex. The paper has three very strong technical results. First, the netback pricing rule for the price of domestic natural gas (based on a Houston benchmark price) leads to...

We address investment in regulated natural gas pipelines when investment is lumpy and the demand for gas is stochastic. This is a problem that can be solved in theory as a dynamic program, but a practical solution depends on functions and parameters that are either subjective or cannot be...