This paper uses a new model of a competitive electricity market to investigate the role of storage in markets dominated by hydro generation. Competition amongst generators leads to an endogenous shadow price of stored water, which facilitates the efficient intra-day and inter-season substitution...

This paper uses a competitive-equilibrium housing-market model to evaluate the role that interest rates played in the U.S. housing boom and bust. The model features stochastic construction costs, disposable income, interest rates, and population, and endogenously determines the supply of...

In infrastructure industries the permitted revenue of a regulated firm depends crucially on the choice of rate base and the allowed rate of return. In this paper we examine the impact of these two variables on the timing of the regulated firm's investment. Since the firm bears all the cost of...

Commodities are physical, not financial, assets. We investigate the effects on equilibrium spot-price behavior of frictions in the storage process, which introduce an element of irreversibility to storage decisions and lead to periods when storage operators do not trade in the spot market. We...

Incentive regulation allows decentralised decision-making under regulatory parameters set on the basis of industry characteristics. When there is uncertainty, sunk costs, and flexibility in the timing of investment a monopoly will invest later than is socially desirable because it garners only a...

The new public management of the 1980s was based in part on a range of important new insights about the role of transaction and agency costs arising from contractual incompleteness in defining the boundaries of the firm and the governance relationships within it. In this paper, we consider the...

Generators supplying electricity markets are subject to volatile input and output prices and uncertain fuel availability. We show that a price-taking generator will generate only when the output price exceeds its operational marginal cost by the value of the option to delay the use of stored...

Generators supplying electricity markets are subject to volatile input and output prices and uncertain fuel availability. Price-risk may be hedged to a considerable extent but fuel-risk - water flows in the case of hydro and gas availability in the case of thermal plants - may not be. We show...

Cooperatives and mutual organisational forms arise for reasons which include contracting problems between parties. Economic literature suggests a variety of allocated inefficiencies implied by these forms that largely have their origins in poor investment decisions. We demonstrate that a...

The major difficulties in assessing market power in electricity wholesale spot markets mean that great weight should be placed upon assessing market outcomes against the fundamental determinants of supply demand and competition. In this spirit we study whether the New Zealand market has been a...