Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

We investigate the displacement effects of phase-out-of-coal policies in a stylized model of electricity generation and CO2 regulation, in which a group of countries operates an emissions trading scheme (ETS). Electricity markets are either international or national and the emissions cap remains...

We propose one of the first dynamic models of the optimal transition from fossil fuels to renewables in electricity generation that takes into account the variability and intermittency of renewable energy as well as storage. This work sheds light on the extent to which variability and...

The movement to deregulate major industries over the past 40 years has produced large efficiency gains. However, distributional effects have been more difficult to assess. In the electricity sector, deregulation has vastly increased information available to market participants through the...

Electricity transmission redistributes environmental impacts across space. We exploit episodes of high electricity transmission system congestion to explore changes in ambient concentrations of air pollutants in the eastern United States. Reducing electricity system congestion decreases ozone...

This paper quantifies a tenant-side "split incentives" problem that exists when the largest commercial sector customers are on electricity-included property lease contracts causing them to face a marginal electricity price of zero. We use exogenous variation in weather shocks to show that the...

This paper investigates the consequences of a locust plague that occurred in Mali in 2004. We argue that in agricultural economies with a single harvest per year, this type of shock can affect households through two channels: first, a speculative/anticipatory effect that kicks in during the...

This paper studies the effects of capacity market reforms that the U.S. grid operators have undertaken in response to state-level subsidies paid to emission-free electricity generation. We first derive an analytical model of energy-and-capacity markets that allows us to predict the price and...

Will a carbon tax improve the welfare consequences of policies to promote electric vehicles? This paper examines when a complementarity could exist between carbon pricing and high electric vehicle adoption. We analyze electricity generation in recent years to show that in several regions, carbon...

We employ hourly electricity load data for Switzerland as a real time indicator of the economic effects of the lockdown following the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Our findings reveal that following the drastic lockdown, overall electricity use decreased by 4 per cent, with a reduction of even 11.3 per...