In this paper, a test is made of whether the Danish electricity producer, Elsam, partly or fully exploits its temporary dominant position in hours of congestion at the Nordic electricity market. There seems to be evidences suggesting that Elsam is successful in pursuing its objective of having a...

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...

Regulators of electricity markets around the world continue to struggle with the problem of incentivizing generators whose output, due to their location in the grid, has no viable substitutes. Such generators possess 'local' market power. Since these generators also compete in broader regional...

We ask under what conditions transmission contracts increase or mitigate market power. We show that the allocation process of transmission rights is crucial. In an efficiently arbitraged uniform price auction generators will only obtain contracts that mitigate their market power. However, if...

In 1995, 1996 and 1997 the U.S. electric power industry saw high rates of announced mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The objective of this paper is to investigate the interactions and effects of M&A and market power, both within California and throughout the U.S., and make recommendations...

Incumbent vertical market power in deregulating markets can be anticompetitive, as seen in the current process of retail electricity restructuring. This paper uses the AT&T antitrust case’s Bell Doctrine precedent of “quarantine the monopoly” as a case study in incumbent vertical market...

In an oligopoly market subject to environmental regulation through tradable pollution permits, polluters' output decisions affect the price of polluting. With a pollution tax, this feedback effect is absent. In a permit regime, I show that the feedback effect increases strategic firms'...

Electricity markets are prone to the abuse of market power. Several US markets employ algorithms to monitor and mitigate market power abuse in real time. The performance of automated mitigation procedures is contingent on precise estimates of firms' marginal production costs. Currently, marginal...

In this paper we investigate the introduction of an export tax on steam coal levied by an individual country (Australia), or a group of major exporting countries. The policy motivation would be twofold: generating tax revenues against the background of improved terms-of-trade, while CO2...

We propose nuclear capacity auctions as a means to improve the incentives for investing in nuclear power. A properly designed auction would (i) allocate the license to the most efficient bidder; (ii) sell the license if and only if new nuclear power was socially optimal. In particular, capacity...