To power national development, the government organized electricity production and distribution as a state-owned vertically integrated utility, structured and operated under central planning. Electricity was supplied on the basis of political priority instead of cost, and the single party...

The electricity industry is undergoing a substantial process of restructuring, with an emphasis on the introduction of competition in the generation sector. Traditional planning methods are not necessarily appropriate for this new environment. This paper extends a previously developed linear...

This Selected Issues paper discusses the economics of energy price reform in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Economic policies in Iran have traditionally relied on the abundant availability of energy at a low price to finance the country’s economic development. Low domestic energy prices...

Theory of financial intermediation gives contradicting answers to the question whether banks should diversify or focus their loan portfolios. Our aim is to find out which of the two strategies is predominant in the German banking market. To this end we measure diversification for all German...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...

This article explores the influence of competitive conditions on the evolutionary fitness of different risk preferences. As a practical example, the professional competition between fund managers is considered. To explore how different settings of competition parameters, the exclusion rate and...

It is shown that early research in modern financial economics had substantially been driven by the application of the research strategy of economics and the use of newly developed mathematical methods. For this purpose the professionalization of business education as a consequence of changes in...

We consider a portfolio optimization problem in a Black-Scholes model with n stocks, in which an investor faces both fixed and proportional transaction costs. The performance of an investment strategy is measured by the average return of the corresponding portfolio over an infinite time horizon....

Climate risk is particularly burdensome to small-scale farmers in developing countries due to heavy dependence on natural resources, limited and erratic rainfall with high inter- and intra-annual variability, and other natural calamities. Numerous studies on climate change suggest that climate...