In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We demonstrate how advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can help ameliorate these data and inference challenges. In the context of an...

Decarbonization and electrification will require a transformed electricity grid. Our long-run model of entry and exit of generation and storage capacity captures crucial aspects of the electricity industry such as time-varying demand for electricity, intermittency of renewables, and...

Future electricity systems with tight constraints on carbon emissions will rely much more on wind and solar generation, with zero marginal cost, than today. We use capacity expansion modelling of Texas in 2050 to illustrate wholesale price distributions in future energy-only, carbon-constrained...

Using hourly offer curves from the Italian day-ahead market and the real-time re-dispatch market for the period January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018, we show how thermal generation unit owners are able to profit from differences between a simplified day-ahead market design that ignores system...

This paper estimates the relationship between investments in five distributed generation technologies and hourly net injections to the distribution grid for over 2,000 substations in France between 2005 and 2018. We find that investments in distributed wind and solar capacity have little or no...

We document the evolution of the newly created market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about market demand and rival behavior. We show that over time prices stabilized, converging...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are active debates about whether increases in energy access should be driven by investments in electric grid infrastructure or small-scale "home solar" systems (e.g., solar lanterns and solar home systems). We summarize the results of a household electrical appliance...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people live without electricity. Despite ambitions of governments and donors to invest in rural electrification, decisions about how to extend electricity access are being made in the absence of rigorous evidence. Using a novel dataset of 20,000 geo-tagged...

Reliable estimates of the value of electricity transmission are critical if these heavily-regulated investments are to be made cost-effectively. In this paper, we exploit the abrupt closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in February 2012. During the previous decade, SONGS...