We examine the impact of liberalization, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and security of supply legislations on the risk-return profiles of European energy utilities over the period 1996 to 2013. Results show that, after controlling for equity market and commodity risk factors, the EU...

The transition of Hong Kong's main economic activities from manufacturing to services is accompanied by gradual changes in the regulatory regimes for monopolies. The local telecommunication services industry has been liberalized, deregulation of public transport is taking shape, and the schemes...

In Germany, substantial drops in wholesale power prices have become a regular phenomenon. While such price drops have far-reaching implications for the functioning of the power market, their underlying determinants remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we propose a Markov regime-switching...

This paper develops a theory of voluntary provision of a public good in which a household's decision to engage in a form of environmentally friendly behavior is based on the desire to offset another behavior that is environmentally harmful. The model generates predictions about (1) participation...

Studies of the firm's demand for factor inputs often assume a constant rate of utilization of the inputs and ignore the fact that the firm can simultaneously choose the level and the rate of utilization of its inputs. In particular, the literature on dynamic factor demand models has, until...

Generating electricity from renewable sources is more expensive than conventional approaches, but reduces pollution externalities. Analyzing the tradeoff is much more challenging than often presumed, because the value of electricity is extremely dependent on the time and location at which it is...

We examine the impact of electricity sector restructuring on the operating efficiency of coal-fired power plants in India. Between 1995 and 2009, 85 percent of coal-based generation capacity owned by state governments was unbundled from vertically integrated State Electricity Boards into state...

For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold...

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are the most popular U.S. state-level policy tools for promoting deployment of electricity from renewable energy (RES-E). While several econometric studies have estimated the effect of RPS policies on RES-E deployment, results are sometimes contradictory....

Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. The Smart Grid is a set of emerging technologies that, among other effects, will facilitate "real-time pricing" for electricity and increase price...