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...

Since the 1990s, efficiency and benchmarking analysis has increasingly been used in network utilities research and regulation. A recurrent concern is the effect of environmental factors that are beyond the influence of firms (observable heterogeneity) and factors that are not identifiable...

In this study, we address a major problem in the measurement of firm performance and the regulation of natural monopolies, namely the intertemporal character of long-term investment decisions. In specific, we focus on the impact of adjustment costs of investments on estimates of firms' technical...

We examine the effect of energy prices and technological knowledge on innovation in green energy technologies. In doing so, we consider both demand-pull effects, which induce innovative activity by increasing the expected value of innovations, and technology-push effects, which drive innovative...

Several countries around the world have introduced reforms to the electric power sector. One important element of these reforms is the introduction of an unbundling process, i.e., the separation of the competitive activities of supply and production from the monopole activity of transmission and...

In the last decades transport activities persistently increased in the EU27 and were strongly coupled to growth in GDP. Like most production processes, they are inevitably linked with the generation of environmentally hazardous by-products, such as CO2 emissions. This leads to the question of...

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...

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...

By 2050, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 80 %. The EU member states have therefore declared to strongly increase the share of renewable energy sources (RES-E) in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities, there are two major impacts...