The European directives for the electricity industry prescribe the creation of a market for balancing electricity supply and demand. In this paper, we demonstrate that a market for balancing has not emerged in the Dutch electricity industry, and that, instead, the balancing transactions are...

In order to facilitate the transition to electricity sectors with low CO2 emissions, it is important to understand which firms invest in new renewable energy technologies, and which firms are responsive to energy policies. This study concentrates on the heterogeneous characteristics of investors...

This unique Handbook explores both the economics of the firm and the theory of the firm, two areas which are traditionally treated separately in the literature. On the one hand, the former refers to the structure, organization and boundaries of the firm, while the latter is devoted to the...

This article presents evidence on opportunistic behaviour by network operators in the liberalized British, Dutch and French electricity industries. The evidence is supplied by 303 regulatory decisions on dispute resolutions for the period 2002–2010. We observe a significant difference in how...

The liberalization and re-regulation of the European electricity industries have been driven by the European Commission's attempt to create one internal competitive electricity market. The European electricity directives require the vertical separation of the European electricity firms to enable...

An increase in the distributed generation of electricity necessitates investments in the distribution network. The current tariff regulation in the Dutch electricity industry, with its ex post evaluation of the efficiency of investments, average benchmarking and a frontier shift in the x-factor,...

The European liberalising electricity industries are still heavily regulated. A prominent form of regulation is directed at the energy companies' forms of governance. European and national regulations prohibit the vertically integrated structures that characterised these companies for almost a...

Many theories on the economics of the firm assume that economic actors are opportunistic. The focus of these theories is on the mitigation of the uncertainty that economic actors may behave opportunistically, and on the ability of contracts and governance structures to reduce this behavioral...