This paper examines vertical arrangements in electricity markets. Vertically integrated wholesalers, or those with long-term contracts, have less incentive to raise wholesale prices when retail prices are determined beforehand. For three restructured markets, we simulate prices that define...

Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover...

We study price convergence between the two major markets for wholesale electricity in California from their deregulation in April 1998 through November 2000, nearly the end of trading in one market. We would expect profit-maximizing traders to have eliminated persistent price differences between...

In an unregulated electricity generation market, the degree to which generators in" different locations compete with one another depends on the capacity to transmit electricity" between the locations. We study the impact of transmission capacity on competition among" generators. We show that...

We use demand and plant-level cost data to simulate competition in a restructured California electricity market. This approach recognizes that firms might have an incentive to restrict output in order to raise price and enables us to explicitly analyze each firm's ability to do so. We find that,...

This paper examines the impact of individual human operators on the fuel efficiency of power plants. Although electricity generation is a fuel and capital intensive enterprise, anecdotal evidence, interviews, and empirical analysis support the hypothesis that labor, particularly power plant...

Advocates of using market mechanisms for addressing greenhouse gases and other pollutants typically argue that it is a necessary step in pricing polluting goods at their social marginal cost (SMC). Retail electricity prices, however, deviate from social marginal cost for many reasons. Some cause...