This paper examines a number of issues associated with alternative analytical approaches for evaluating investments in electricity transmission infrastructure and alternative institutional arrangements to govern network operation, maintenance and investment. The economic and physical attributes...

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed...

We examine the performance attributes of a merchant transmission investment framework that relies on “market driven” transmission investment to provide the infrastructure to support competitive wholesale markets for electricity. Under a stringent set of assumptions, the merchant investment...

An enduring issue in environmental regulation is whether to clean up existing “old” plants or in some manner to bring in new “clean” plants to replace the old. In this paper, a unit-level data base of emissions by nearly 2000 electric generating units from 1985 through 2002 is used to...

Long-term supply contracts often have ambiguous effects on the competitive structure, investment and consumer welfare in the long term. In a context of market building, these effects are likely to be worsened and thus even harder to assess. Since liberalization and especially since the release...

The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to an assessment of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills specify emissions reductions to be achieved through 2050 for the standard six-gas basket of greenhouse gases....

We examine the degree of natural gas market integration in Europe, North America and Japan, between the mid 1990’s and 2002. Our hypothesis is that there was a certain split of prices between Europe and North America. The relationship between the international gas marker prices and their...

This paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of Superfund sponsored clean-ups of hazardous waste sites. We show that if consumers value the clean-ups, then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home...

In this paper we provide a simulations-based demonstration of a hybrid electricity market that combines the distributed competitive advantages of decentralized markets with the system security guarantees of centralized markets. In this market, the transmission service provider (TSP) guides an...