Since the 1990s, efficiency and benchmarking analysis has increasingly been used in network utilities research and regulation. A recurrent concern is the effect of environmental factors that are beyond the influence of firms (observable heterogeneity) and factors that are not identifiable...

We explore the hypothesis that export policies and trade patterns of national players in the steam coal market are consistent with non-competitive market behavior. We test this hypothesis by developing an equilibrium model which is able to model coal producing nations as strategic players. We...

The European Commission has intensively discussed the mandatory separation of natural gas transmission from production and services. However, economic theory is ambiguous on the price effects of vertical separation. In this paper, we empirically analyse the effect of ownership unbundling of gas...

In 2007, Germany changed network access regulation in the natural gas sector and introduced a so-called entry-exit system. The re-regulation's spot market effects remain to be examined. We use cointegration analysis and a state space model with time-varying coefficients to study the development...

Supply shocks in the global gas market might affect countries differently since the market is regionally interlinked but not perfectly integrated. Additionally, high supply side concentration might expose countries to market power in different ways. To evaluate the strategic position of...

The German Energiewende’s potential effects on the reliability of electricity supply as well as the corresponding economic consequences have recently entered both the political and scientific debate. However, empirical evidence of power outage costs in Germany is rather scarce. Following a...

Supervised dimension reduction methods have been extensively applied in different scientific fields like biology and medicine in recent years. However, they have hardly ever been used in micro economics, and in particular cost function modeling. Nonetheless, these methods can also be useful in...

By 2050, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 80 %. The EU member states have therefore declared to strongly increase the share of renewable energy sources (RES-E) in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities, there are two major impacts...

Die Förderung regenerativer Energien in Deutschland durch das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) führt zu diversen Verteilungseffekten. Unterschiede in den geografischen und klimatischen Bedingungen sowie den Siedlungs- und Mieterstrukturen haben unter anderem eine erhebliche regionale...

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011 led to some drastic reactions in Germany, in particular an immediate shut-down of older nuclear power plants. This event is therefore often seen as a turning point, or a major accelerator for the German Energiewende. We investigate the short term...