After the deregulation of the German electricity markets, network access charges are based on contractual arrangements between energy producers and industrial consumers. As the electricity networks are incontestable natural monopolies, the operators are able to set (monopolistic) charges at...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries and is increasingly addressed in regulatory schemes. However, this important aspect is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis of these industries. In this paper we present an efficiency...

In 2004, European competition law had been faced with considerable changes due to the introduction of the new Council Regulation No. 1/2003. One of the major renewals was the replacement of the centralized notification system for inter-company cooperations in favor of a so-called legal exemption...

The promotion of renewable energies in Germany by the Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz (EEG, Renewable Energy Act) leads to various distributional effects.

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...

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...

Supply shocks in the global gas market might aff ect countries diff erently 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...