Most central banks currently implement monetary policy by targeting a short-term interest rate. This paper asks: "What is the optimal form for such interest rate targeting, given the objectives facing central banks?" We find the optimal rule is for the central bank to change the target rate...

Under the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, forests planted on or after January 1, 1990, earn carbon credits. These credits have to be repaid when the forest is harvested. This paper analyses the effects of this scheme on the value of bareland on which radiata pine is to be planted. A real...

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

The existing real options literature explains the value premium as a consequence of either operating leverage raising risk in low-demand states or industry-wide investment lowering risk in high-demand states. This paper presents a simple model in which a value premium arises solely from capacity...

Conventional wisdom, used to explain the value premium, is that greater operating leverage increases systematic risk and therefore leads to a higher expected rate of return earned by a firm's owners. This paper shows that the relationship between operating leverage and the expected return is...

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report’s measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...

Climate change is one of the toughest challenges facing the world today. Putting a price on carbon emissions is an important step towards climate change mitigation. A cap and trade system is one of the ways to create a carbon price. The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZETS) is the...

This paper presents a model of competing payment schemes. Unlike previous work on generic twosided markets, the model allows for the fact that in a payment system users on one side of the market (merchants) compete to attract users on the other side (consumers who may use cards for purchases)....