Over the last few decades, several instruments have evolved to deal with similar energy and environmental challenges. For instance, the economic literature prescribes separate tax or cap-and-trade systems to internalize negative environmental externalities and subsidies to internalize positive...

An issue of major concern to politicians and policy-makers around the world today is whether transport infrastructure investments, such as those in roads and airports, generate enough economic benefits to justify their very large price tag. Beginning in the mid 1970s, nearly all OECD countries...

Productivity measures ignoring environmental effects may give misleading information on total productivity growth. Further, business cycles in the form of capacity utilization may also significantly influence productivity measures. In this paper, we develop an overall Malmquist productivity...

We present a model for an energy market that includes a green certificate for suppliers of energy from renewables and a purchaser commitment to buy these certificates. We show that price and volume effects in the energy market are ambigous under a wide range of alternative levels of the...

Electricity markets have typically been regulated all over the world. In Europe, UK and Norway have begun to deregulate their electricity markets. Several more countries will probably join them in the near future, for example Finland, Sweden and Spain. The objectives are twofold: to increase...

Although environmental regulations may imply a cost increase on firm's conventional input factors, such regulations could stimulate the incentives to improve factor productivity. Productivity measures including indicators capturing environmental improvements may also show higher or lower...

National and international expansion of transmission networks and diminishing returns to scale in hydropower capacity expansion has raised the opportunity cost of electricity. The resulting changes in comparative advantage between industries have in many countries been counteracted by government...

In this paper, we describe the approach to, and experience of, the deregulation and liberalisation of the Norwegian electricity sector from 1991. The Norwegian electricity market was subsequently integrated with the Swedish, Finnish and Danish markets to become the Nordic electricity market: the...

The welfare effects of introducing taxes on emissions of carbon dioxide is analysed within an empirical general equilibrium model of the Norwegian economy. A CO2 tax regime where we aim at stabilising the CO2 emissions at the 1990 emission level in 2020 is compared to a reference scenario...

All participants in power exchanges are interested in market responses when electricity prices change because this influences the profitability of actions. Contrary to most econometric work in this field, which uses annual time series or panel data, we exploit high-frequency data from a power...