This paper explores the scale and behaviour of abnormal returns observed in the equity of the 10 Water and Sewerage Companies (WASCs) in England and Wales that were formed at privatisation of the UK water industry in 1989. The paper uses the CAPM and employs techniques of the Kalman Filter to...

Utilities regulation attempts to attenuate the effects of market failure. Contemporary systems of regulation are generally either rate of return or price cap (RPI-X) systems. This paper addresses the issue of the levels of excess returns and risk inherent in investment in the equity of regulated...

We examine the bidding behavior of firms competing on ERCOT, the hourly electricity balancing market in Texas. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding into this uniform-price divisible-good auction market. Using detailed firm-level data on bids and marginal costs of generation, we find...

Estimating market power is often complicated by the lack of reliable measures of marginal cost. Instead, policy-makers often rely on other summary statistics of the market, thought to be correlated with price cost margins---such as concentration ratios or the HHI. In many industries, these...

The paper examines the economic and regulatory factors that led to an explosion in the wholesale power prices, supply shortages, and utility insolvencies in California’s electricity sector. A necessary first step in determining the lessons learned from the California electricity crisis is a...

“Network neutrality” and “open access” are two policies designed to preserve openness on the Internet. Open access mandates openness of conduits (e.g. television cable and DSL) to service providers (e.g. America Online), while network neutrality mandates openness to advanced content...

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill...

This paper seeks to bridge the gap between economists focused on designing competitive market mechanisms and engineers focused on the physical attributes and engineering requirements they perceive as being needed for operating a reliable electric power system. The paper starts by deriving the...

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrags steht eine Analyse des kalifornischen Strommarktdebakels und der Lehren aus den dortigen Ereignissen. Das Papier geht auf die Entwicklung der Märkte ein und zeigt die Gründe für das Scheitern des kalifornischen Übergangsmodells auf. Die Analyse zeigt, dass es...