Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover...

We analyze the demand for emissions allowances and the supply of allowances and abatement opportunities in California's 2013-2020 cap and trade market for greenhouse gases (GHG). We estimate a cointegrated vector autoregression for the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions using annual data...

Beginning in early 2011, crude oil production in the U.S. Midwest and Canada surpassed the pipeline capacity to transport it to the Gulf Coast where it could access the world oil market. As a result, the U.S. "benchmark" crude oil price in Cushing, Oklahoma, declined substantially relative to...

Regulators and firms often use incentive schemes to attract skillful agents and to induce them to put forth effort in pursuit of the principals' goals. Incentive schemes that reward skill and effort, however, may also punish agents for adverse outcomes beyond their control. As a result, such...

This papers analyzes dispersion in the prices that an airline charges to different customers on the same route. Such variation in airlines fares is substantial: the expected absolute difference in fares between two of an airline's passengers on a route averages thirty-six percent of the...

The standard economic model of efficient competitive markets relies on the ability of sellers to charge prices that vary as their costs change. Yet, there is no restructured electricity market in which most retail customers can be charged realtime prices (RTP), prices that can change as...

We use demand and plant-level cost data to simulate competition in a restructured California electricity market. This approach recognizes that firms might have an incentive to restrict output in order to raise price and enables us to explicitly analyze each firm's ability to do so. We find that,...

A number of recent antitrust lawsuits have been settled with discount contracts in which the defendants agree in the future to sell to the plaintiffs at a discount off of the price they offer to other buyers. Economists often object to such settlements, arguing that the sellers will partially or...

Effective competition in wholesale electricity markets is a necessary feature of a successful electricity supply industry restructuring. We examine the degree of competition in the California wholesale electricity market during the period June 1998 to September 1999 by comparing the market...

One of the most critical concerns that customers have voiced in the debate over real-time retail electricity pricing is that they would be exposed to risk from fluctuations in their electricity cost. The concern seems to be that a customer could find itself consuming a large quantity of power on...