Privatization has certainly been one of the main events of the economic and financial history of the 20th century. Between 1997 and 2004 more than 4,000 privatization operations were carried out in the world, bringing to governments revenues for over 1,350US$billion. Western Europe emerges as...

This paper evaluates the predictability of WTI light sweet crude oil futures by using the variance risk premium, i.e. the difference between model-free measures of implied and realized volatilities. Additional regressors known for their ability to explain crude oil futures prices are also...

Crude oil prices have been fluctuating over time and by a large range. It is the disorganization of oil price series that makes it difficult to deduce the changing trends of oil prices in the middle- and long-terms and predict their price levels in the short-term. Following a price-state...

In order to reach a goal of universal access to modern energy services in Africa by 2030, consideration of various electricity sector pathways is required to help inform policy-makers and investors, and help guide power system design. To that end, and building on existing tools and analysis, we...

According to the Rockets and Feathers hypothesis (RFH), the transmission mechanism of positive and negative changes in the price of crude oil to the price of gasoline is asymmetric. Although there have been many contributions documenting that downstream prices are more reactive to increases than...

If dangerous and irreversible climatic events are to be avoided, global average temperature should not increase by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In order to achieve such a global target, a mitigation pathway has to limit global emissions to about 50 percent below 1990 levels by...

We analyze the relationship between the prices of ethanol, agricultural commodities and livestock in Nebraska, the U.S. second largest ethanol producer. The paper focuses on long-run relations and Granger causality linkages between ethanol and the other commodities.The analysis takes possible...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

Ultra-hazardous risky activities as nuclear industry cannot be considered as “normal industries” i.e. industries without abnormal environmental and health risks. Consequently, the industrial organization of these specific sectors is of the utmost importance. This paper aims at studying this...

Control power (regulating power, balancing power) is used to quickly restore the supply-demand balance in power systems. Variable renewable energy sources (VRE) such as wind and solar power are often thought to increase the reserve requirement significantly. This paper provides a comprehensive...