Upon discussion of price setting on electricity wholesale markets, many refer to the so-called merit order model. Conventional wisdom holds that during most hours of the year, coal- or natural gas-fired power plants set the price on European markets. In this context, this paper analyses price...

This paper examines the effects of introducing competition into monopolized network industries on prices and infrastructure quality. Analyzing a model with reduced-form demand, we first show that deregulating an integrated monopoly cannot simultaneously decrease the retail price and increase...

We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider’s incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide...

Among the wide variety of policy options adopted worldwide to control carbon emissions, one of the most environmentally effective and economically efficient is represented by carbon tax, that aims to recoup the damage arising from polluting production processes. In this paper, we focus on the...

The search for economically efficient policy instruments designed to promote the diffusion of renewable energy technologies in liberalized markets has led to the introduction of quota-based tradable 'green' certificate (TGC) schemes for renewable electricity. However, there is a debate about the...

We study the performance under uncertainty of three renewable energy policy instruments: Tradable Renewable Quota (TRQ), Feed-In-Tariff (FIT), and Feed-In-Premium (FIP). We develop a stylized model of the electricity market, where renewables are characterized by a positive learning externality,...

The recent price coupling of many European electricity markets has triggered a fundamental change in the interaction of day-ahead prices, challenging additionally the modeling of the joint behavior of prices in interconnected markets. In this paper we propose a regime-switching AR-GARCH copula...

Coordinating the timing and location of new production facilities is one of the challenges of liberalized power sectors. It is complicated by the presence of transmission bottlenecks, oligopolistic competition, and the unknown prospects of low-carbon technologies. The authors build a model...