practical operation strategies for pumped hydroelectric energy storage phes utilising electricity price arbitrage abstract in this paper three practical operation strategies 24optimal 24prognostic and 24hsitrocial are compared to the optimum profit feasible for a phes facility with a 360 mw pump 300 mw turbine and a 2 gwh storage utilising price arbitrage on 13 electricity spot markets the results indicate that almost all 97 of the profits can be obtained by a phes facility when it is optimised using the 24optimal strategy developed which optimises the energy storage based on the day ahead electricity prices however to maximise profits with the 24optimal strategy the day ahead electricity prices must be the actual prices which the phes facility is charged or the phes operator must have very accurate price predictions otherwise the predicted profit could be significantly reduced and even become a loss finally using the 24optimal strategy the phes profit can surpass the annual investment repayments required however over the 5 year period investigated 2005 2009 the annual profit from the phes facility varied by more than 50 on five out of six electricity markets considered considering the 40 year lifetime of phes even with low investment costs a low interest rate and a suitable electricity market phes is a risky investment without a more predictable profit

nonlinear pricing in an oligopoly market the case of specialty coffee firms that use nonlinear pricing may distort product characteristics away from their efficient levels this paper offers the first empirical study of this issue using data from a specialty coffee market i estimate a structural utility model to compute consumers benefits from changing products sizes i then compare the estimated benefits to cost data design distortions are relatively large for products not targeted to the highest demand consumers distortions decrease toward zero with drink size for products with the largest profit margins these results support some of the central predictions from nonlinear pricing theory including no distortion at the top

a theory of commerce abstract the theory of commerce advanced here captures prominent features of retail trade large employment congestion effects anonymous posted prices and quantity discounts this theory is built around a directed search model where buyers preferences are private information the analytical solution is easily inserted in a neoclassical growth framework in this framework the parameters of retail trade are calibrated using commercial margins and employment welfare properties depend on the sellers ability to charge two tier prices with two tier prices the directed search equilibrium is efficient otherwise it is not this contrasts with the full information benchmark where directed search is always efficient

risk unemployment and the stock market a rare event based explanation of labor market volatility what is the driving force behind the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies what is the relation between job creation incentives of firms and stock market valuations we answer these questions in a model with time varying risk modeled as a small and variable probability of an economic disaster a high probability implies greater risk and lower future growth lowering the incentives of firms to invest in hiring during periods of high risk stock market valuations are low and unemployment rises the model thus explains volatility in equity and labor markets and the relation between the two first draft november 15 2014 kilic mkilic wharton upenn edu wachter jwachter wharton upenn edu we are grateful to andy abel gabriel chodorow reich max croce giuliano curatola zvi eckstein joao gomes urban jermann christian opp sang byung seo ctirad slavik mathieu taschereau dumouchel michael wachter nancy ran xu amir yaron and seminar participants at the wharton school at the trans atlantic doctoral conference at the western finance association meetings and at the safe asset pricing workshop for helpful comments

rare disasters and exchange rates we propose a new model of exchange rates which yields a theory of the forward premium puzzle our explanation combines two ingredients the possibility of rare economic disasters and an asset view of the exchange rate our model is frictionless has complete markets and works for an arbitrary number of countries in the model rare worldwide disasters can occur and affect each country s productivity each country s exposure to disaster risk varies over time according to a mean reverting process ri sky countries command high risk premia they feature a depreciated exchange rate and a high interest rate as their risk premium mean reverts their exchange rate appreciates therefore currencies of high interest rate countries appreciate on average to make the notion of disaster risk more implementable we show how options prices might in principle uncover latent disaster risk and help forecast exchange rate movements we then extend the framework to incorporate two factors a disaster risk factor and a business cycle factor we calibrate the model and obtain quantitatively realistic values for the volatility of the exchange rate the forward premium puzzle regression coefficients and near random walk exchange rate dynamics finally we solve a model of stock markets across countries which yields a series of predictions about the joint behavior of exchange rates bonds options and stocks across countries the evidence from the options market appears to be supportive of the model jel e43 e44 f31 g12 g15

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

policy changes and the dynamics of capacity expansion in the swiss electricity market abstract capacity of supply is a crucial matter in electricity markets as it directly influences reliability of supply price volatility and blackout risk in this paper we analyse the dynamics of capacity expansion in the swiss electricity market and the impact of different policies such as nuclear phaseout and management of electricity exchanges imports and exports policies this article develops the conceptualization model presented in ochoa p 2007b policy changes in the swiss electricity market a system dynamics analysis of likely market responses socio economic planning sciences 41 4 336 349 we build a system dynamics model based on the dynamics of capacity expansion explained in the latter paper and present and analyse different scenarios we conclude that international electricity exchanges are important for the swiss market as they help to lower costs and to increase the income of the utility companies however we illustrate the need for explicit policies for managing imports and exports of electricity to avoid import dependence from neighbouring countries

matching markets with adverse selection abstract this paper considers a market with adverse selection in the spirit of rothschild and stiglitz quart j econ 90 1976 629 the major departure from existing approaches is that we model a decentralized market that is open ended and constantly refilled by new participants e g by new workers and firms in the case of a labor market the major novelty of this approach is that the distribution of types in the market becomes an endogenous variable which is jointly determined with equilibrium contracts as frictions become small we show that the least cost separating contracts are always supported as an equilibrium outcome regardless of the distribution of types among entrants moreover we derive conditions under which this outcome is also unique

combinations of support instruments for renewable electricity in europe a review abstract the aim of this paper is to review the combinations of res e support instruments in the european union eu using different sources of data it is shown that combinations are indeed a widespread phenomenon in the eu member states not much attention has been paid to the combinations of primary instruments with other secondary instruments for the same renewable energy technology it is found that the most frequent mixes of instruments are between feed in laws feed in tariffs and increasingly feed in premiums on the one hand and investment subsidies soft loans and tax incentives on the other in a broad sense the policy mix between primary and secondary instruments has experienced some changes over the last decade mostly related to changes in the primary instruments themselves exclusion i e ineligibility to apply for an instrument when the res e generator is already being financially supported by another instrument and explicit coordination of support under primary and secondary instruments do not seem to be common elements in these policy combinations

price discrimination in free entry markets using a spatial model of monopolistic competition we investigate price discrimination in free entry zero profit markets we show that when brands are heterogeneous competition does not prevent discrimination the power to earn economic profits is not necessary for a firm to maintain discriminatory prices our model treats formally the fact that consumers difer not only in the utility they derive from a good but also in how strongly they prefer one brand over all others in markets where firms are very competitive sorting consumers on the strength on brand preference produces larger price differentials between groups than sorting on the basis of consumers reservation prices for the good when firms sort customers on the basis of strength of brand preference however we find that the output and welfare effects are generally less favorable than when sorting is more closely related to consumers reservation prices

screening in a matching market contract design under incomplete information is often analysed in a bilaterally monopolistic setting if the informed party s reservation value does not depend on its private information its type it is a standard result that the uninformed side offers low types distorted contracts to reduce the information rent left to high types we challenge this result by embedding contract design in a matching market environment we consider a market where players meet pairwise and where in each match either side may be chosen to make a take it or leave it offer as frictions become sufficiently low we find that the set of equilibria is independent of whether there is complete or incomplete information in particular all contracts are free of distortions

testing models of consumer search using data on web browsing and purchasing behavior using a large data set on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various classical search models we nd that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known distributions of prices can be rejected based on the recall patterns we observe in the data moreover we show that even if consumers are initially unaware of the price distribution and have to learn the price distribution observed search behavior for given consumers over time is more consistent with non sequential search than sequential search with learning our

competitive price discrimination we model firms as supplying utility directly to consumers the equilibrium outcome of competition in utility space depends on the relationship u between profit and average utility per consumer public policy constraints on the deals firms may offer affect equilibrium outcomes via their effect on u f rom this perspective we examine the profit utility and welfare implications of price discrimination policies in an oligopolistic framework we also show that an equilibrium outcome of competitive nonlinear pricing when consumers have private information about their tastes is for firms to offer efficient two part tariffs

market and regulatory barriers to electrical energy storage innovation abstract energy storage has been identified as a priority technology for innovation however the rapidly developing family of storage technologies will find it difficult under the current regulatory regimes to compete with conventional generators for the provision of electricity system services and this is likely to impede innovation this paper analyses and categorizes 16 investment barriers hindering the near term deployment of energy storage technologies in electricity markets which are related to four regulatory and public attitudes barriers the most important regulatory barrier is the current classification of storage as a generation asset despite it being unable to provide a positive net flow of electricity which is used to justify double network usage charges the merit order design of balancing and ancillary markets hampers the ability of storage technologies to recoup their relatively high capital cost while capacity markets penalize their limited discharge duration network companies are in the best position to realize the system value of storage but their ownership may only be acceptable if system operation is made independent of network operation current initiatives to address these issues include flexible connection agreements and the development of enhanced frequency response and aggregate fast reserve services however to remove the identified barriers a market structure that valued the flexibility offered by storage viewing it as complementing rather than competing with network and generation assets would be required

regulatory reform of the electricity industry in japan what is the next step of deregulation abstract in japan competitive bidding for new generating capacity ipps is in progress since 1996 retail competition was introduced for large customers contract demand over 2 mw after march 2000 although the liberalization is limited in part by the fact that the retail power market has only about 30 share of total electricity demand the eligible customers now have a choice among the nine major utilities and ten new entrants since november 2001 the electricity industry committee has been discussing the next step of liberalization including the opening of the market for medium size industrial and commercial high voltage 6 kv customers from 2004 and 2005 on this paper presents the experiences so far acquired and the technical issues for further deregulation the process includes the creation of nationwide power exchange and of a neutral organization to coordinate the transmission system by 2005 the paper deals with the characteristics of the new regulatory reform of the electricity supply industry in japan during the period of 2003 2007 we show that it is important to understand the complexity of market behavior and design the market reform carefully

information and prices with capacity constraints since george j stigler s 1961 seminal work the literature on consumer search has attempted to understand the relationship between the prices that are set by sell ers and the extent to which consumers can observe and compare these prices before purchasing a good in the theoretical branch of this literature one conclusion is almost universal as buyers become better informed about prices ex ante sellers will set lower prices in equilibrium 1 in fact this relationship is so engrained in the theory of consumer search that it is often accepted as manifest and applied to various markets and situations with little or no hesitation 2 in this paper i examine a completely standard consumer search model with one small yet often relevant additional restriction i assume that sellers possess a limited number of goods or can only serve a limited number of customers at once so that a given seller may be unable to meet realized demand in such an environment i show that the conven tional wisdom regarding information and prices does not necessarily hold having more informed consumers can lead to either an increase or decrease in equilibrium prices or have no effect at all i characterize the regions of the parameter space where each is likely to occur the assumption that a seller s capacity may be fixed and that this constraint may be binding is a fairly important feature of many markets in some markets time is the constraint doctors and barbers and contractors can only serve a limited number of clients at once in other markets space is an issue private schools have a lim ited number of spots in each classroom while restaurants have a limited number of tables perhaps most common is markets in which sellers inventory is occasionally a limiting factor landlords have a limited number of apartments for rent and ticket agents have a limited number of concert tickets available in markets such as these consumers regularly trade off price and availability they are willing to pay more for

balancing demand pull and supply push measures to support renewable electricity in europe abstract increasing the share of renewable energy is deemed essential to reduce the carbon intensity of the current electricity mix the promotion of renewable energy technologies should thus be as effective and efficient as possible therefore support schemes should explicitly consider the balance between demand pull e g production subsidies and supply push efforts public rdd the cumulative pull push ratio for biogas is about 700 in the 5 year lag case and about 1200 in the other cases 10 yr lag or more although the debate on optimal rd d efforts is not conclusive and very sector specific it is relevant to compare our findings to average pull push ratios of about 20 in the engineering sector overall we can safely conclude that european governments should critically evaluate current renewables subsidy schemes and increase public rd d investments to support next waves of renewable energy technologies

advertising in competitive markets in this paper small firms sell a homogeneous good to small consumers under conditions of free entry but consumers receive price information only through firms advertising in equilibrium every firm on the continuous price distribution buys less advertising than is socially optimal the result is robust if firms advertise in just one medium if readers of different advertising media are positively correlated excess advertising can occur in media used exclusively to advertise discount prices copyright 1991 by american economic association

product line rivalry and market segmentation with an application to automobile optional engine pricing this paper addresses the questions whether and when the pricing practices on base products may differ from those of premium products sold with options or add ons various alternative models are considered a monopoly model a model of brand rivalry with full consumer information and a model of rivalry in which consumers are only well informed about base product prices only the brand rivalry model with limited consumer information predicts that premium products have larger percentage markups than base products provided that brand rivalry is sufficiently intense empirical evidence on base and premium product pricing in the automobile market is consistent with the limited information model and inconsistent with the other two models

a review of pumped hydro energy storage development in significant international electricity markets the global effort to decarbonise electricity systems has led to widespread deployments of variable renewable energy generation technologies which in turn has boosted research and development interest in bulk electrical energy storage ees however despite large increases in research funding many electricity markets with increasingly large proportions of variable renewable generation have seen little actual bulk ees deployment while this can be partly attributed to the need for technological developments it is also due to the challenge of fairly rewarding storage operators for the range of services that storage provides to the wider network especially in markets that have undergone significant restructuring and liberalisation pumped hydroelectric energy storage phes is the overwhelmingly established bulk ees technology with a global installed capacity around 130 gw and has been an integral part of many markets since the 1960s this review provides an historical overview of the development of phes in several significant electrical markets and compares a number of mechanisms that can reward phes in different international market frameworks as well as providing up to date information about phes a primary motivation for this work is to provide an overview about the types of rewards available to bulk ees for the wider storage community including investors technology developers and policy makers observing that bulk ees projects seem to be unattractive investments for the private sector the paper also includes a brief discussion in terms of public sector investment

limited information and advertising in the u s personal computer industry traditional discrete choice models assume buyers are aware of all products for sale in markets where products change rapidly the full information assumption is untenable i present a discrete choice model of limited consumer information where advertising influences the set of products from which consumers choose to purchase i apply the model to the u s personal computer market where top firms spend over 2 billion annually on advertising i find estimated markups of 19 over production costs where top firms advertise more than average and earn higher than average markups high markups are explained to a large extent by informational asymmetries across consumers where full information models predict markups of one fourth the magnitude i find that estimated product demand curves are biased toward being too elastic under traditional models i show how to use data on media exposure to improve estimated price elasticities in the absence of micro ad data

disaster risk and preference shifts in a new keynesian model in rbc models disaster risk shocks reproduce countercyclical risk premia but generate an increase in consumption along the recession and asset price fall through their effects on agents preferences gourio 2012 this paper offers a solution to this puzzle by developing a new keynesian model with such a small but time varying probability of disaster we show that price stickiness combined with an eis smaller than unity restores procyclical consumption and wages while preserving countercyclical risk premia in response to disaster risk shocks the mechanism then provides a rationale for discount factor first and second moment uncertainty shocks

monopoly with incomplete information recent theoretical research on principal agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other s actions here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal the monopolist the main contribution is to show that under a separability assumption strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market the results also shed light on related topics such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling

optimal nonuniform prices we consider optimal nonuniform pricing schedules where the price depends upon the amount purchased such schedules are regularly used by public utilities and other services welfare optimal nonuniform prices are related to the theory of optimal uniform prices developed by ramsey we characterize situations in which upward or downward discontinuities in pricing schedules are optimal our results are applicable to a number of related problems including optimal taxation insurance and incentives economic theory has confined most of its attention to markets with uniform prices in which the price per unit charged is invariant to the level of a customer s purchases this focus is warranted when goods are resellable since any attempt to charge nonuniform prices could be circumvented by reselling amongst customers but when goods are not resellable nonuniform prices are not only possible but common public utilities have declining block pricing with lower unit charges for large levels of consumption many agencies providing services including communications transportation even education use two part pricing with a fixed entry or retainer charge and a further charge per unit consumption nonuniform price schedules can be expected to be ever more common as services become a larger fraction of total output the increasing prevalence of nonuniform pricing policies have made them the focus of recent public and economic attention oi 1971 feldstein 1972 and ng and weisser 1974 have examined optimal two part pricing policies leland and meyer 1976 examine block pricing and show by example that optimal welfare policies may require nonuniform prices if zero profit constraints are binding in this paper we consider arbitrary nonuniform pricing policies using variational techniques two part and block pricing schedules are of course special cases of the environment we consider the work most closely related to our examination is the seminal paper by spence 1978 and subsequent analysis by roberts 1979 spence however does not pay explicit attention to the key role played by constraints on optimal pricing schedules roberts considers upward price discontinuities which lead to bunching of consumers at a given level of consumption but not downward price discontinuities which lead to regions in which no consumer chooses to consume gaps bunching or gaps may appear in the optimal price schedule even when underlying demand and cost functions are smooth and well behaved the prevalence of discontinuous pricing schedules e g the block pricing structures of public utilities argues that these questions are of practical as well as theoretical interest

overall review of pumped hydro energy storage in china status quo operation mechanism and policy barriers abstract with the integration of increased variable renewable energy generation and advent of liberalized electricity market much attention has been devoted on the development of pumped hydro energy storage phes as it has many prominent advantages of ensuring the safe and steady operation of power grid in china phes has met a booming periods for the last ten years currently there are 24 phes stations with an installed capacity of 16 95 gw while government s target of 2020 is 50 02 gw in this paper we provide an overall review of china s phes development with a detailed presentation of the installed capacity and distribution of existing and proposed phes stations examine 4 typical stations in order to give a good description for the practical functions of phes in power grid analyze the management mode and price mechanism of phes operation and point out the barriers in phes development in china state grid corporation of china sgcc which are making great efforts on china s phes development is discussed as a role model on that basis we suggest phes in the fast developing period should be temporarily operated and scheduled by grid companies in terms of exertion of its positive effects while government should also take responsibility to subsidize on the stations operation to relieve the price pressure of the ever growing integration of renewable energy

on grid electricity tariffs in china development reform and prospects abstract with the introduction of market oriented measures in china s power sector in the mid 1980s electricity sale prices to the grid companies on grid electricity tariffs became the focus of the energy industry thus affecting all related stakeholders including fuel suppliers power generators and end use consumers a number of changes have gradually been undertaken in terms of electricity tariff settings and their implementation to address specific requirements of the expansion of the power industry at each stage of its development on grid electricity tariffs had been used as a key lever to attract investment in power generation at an early stage of reform and then to encourage competition in the power industry in response to the rising concerns about environmental protection and the promotion of clean energy utilisation tariffs have progressively been developed for renewable electricity generation which has contributed to massive expansion of the renewable power industry in china this paper reviews key milestones of the development of on grid electricity tariffs in china examines the tariff setting mechanisms of coal fired power plants and renewable power generation analyses the factors associated with the adjustments of the tariff levels and discusses the options for further reform and more effective electricity pricing

nonlinear pricing with random participation the canonical selection contracting programme takes the agent s participation decision as deterministic and finds the optimal contract typically satisfying this constraint for the worst type upon weakening this assumption of known reservation values by introducing independent randomness into the agents outside options we find that some of the received wisdom from mechanism design and nonlinear pricing is not robust and the richer model which allows for stochastic participation affords a more general empirical specification we develop a multidimensional methodology for addressing this class of problems providing two important applications to nonlinear pricing first with nonlinear pricing by a monopolist the familiar nodistortion at the top result persists but in tandem with the surprising conclusion that there is either no distortion at the bottom or bunching second in a simple model of product differentiated duopolists competing with nonlinear pricing we show that generally the duopoly outcome is qualitatively similar to the monopoly outcome however when marginal costs are symmetric and competition is sufficiently intense distortions disappear and the equilibrium outcome takes a remarkably simple form efficient quality allocations with cost plus fee pricing

the term structure of interest rates in a dsge model with recursive preferences abstract a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model in which households have epstein and zin recursive preferences is solved with perturbation the parameters governing preferences and technology are estimated by maximum likelihood using macroeconomic data and the term structure of interest rates the estimates imply a large risk aversion an elasticity of intertemporal substitution higher than one and substantial adjustment costs furthermore the paper identifies the tensions within the model by estimating it on subsets of these data the analysis concludes by pointing out potential extensions that may improve the model s fit

contractual distortions in a market with frictions abstract this paper analyses contract design in a decentralized market environment with frictions while principals e g firms have all contractual power their market power is constrained as agents e g workers can choose to wait and search for better offers we find that results depend crucially on how market frictions affect agents utilities with type independent costs of search and waiting equilibrium contracts are always first best if agents are impatient and discount future payoffs however distortions vanish only gradually in the latter case we also characterize equilibrium offers and show that the market exhibits two types of externalities both of which are absent in the case of type independent costs of search

sorting versus screening search frictions and competing mechanisms in a market where sellers compete by posting trading mechanisms we allow for a general search technology and show that its features crucially affect the equilibrium mechanism price posting prevails when meetings are rival i e when a meeting by one buyer reduces another buyer s meeting probability under price posting buyers reveal their type by sorting ex ante only if the meeting technology is sufficiently non rival price posting is not an equilibrium multiple buyer types then visit the same sellers who screen ex post through auctions

fifth order perturbation solution to dsge models abstract this paper derives a fifth order perturbation solution to dsge models the paper develops a new notation that reduces the notational complexity of high order solutions and yields a faster code the new notation consists of new matrix forms of high order multivariate chain rules and a new representation of the model as a function of one vector variable the algorithm that implements the new notation is between 3 and 55 times faster than dynare depending on model size and solution order

competitive screening under heterogeneous information we study the interplay between informational frictions and second degree price discrimination our theory recognizes that consumers differ in their tastes for quality as well as in the information they possess about available offers which leads to dispersion over price quality menus in equilibrium while firms are ex ante identical we show that their menus are ordered so that more generous menus leave more surplus to consumers of all valuations we explore the cross section of equilibrium menus and variations in market conditions to generate empirical predictions on prices qualities and markups across firms and within a firm s product line for instance more competition may raise prices for low quality goods yet consumers are better off as the qualities they receive also increase the predictions of our model illuminate empirical findings in many markets such as those for cell phone plans yellow pages advertising cable tv and air travel

the effect of satellite entry on cable television prices and product quality how has the entry of satellite television affected the pricing and product quality of incumbent cable firms programming packages i estimate a model in which firms compete over both price and product quality as determined by what channels are offered satellite entry typically causes cable firms to raise quality and lower price however in some markets cable optimally responds by raising both price and quality or by lowering both price and quality a counterfactual scenario that eliminates quality competition results in on average softer price competition and lower aggregate consumer surplus but greater surplus for consumers with weaker preferences for quality

estimating price cost markups under nonlinear pricing competition this paper provides a structural interpretation to the estimates of the shape and position of nonlinear tariffs we focus on the evaluation of price cost margins and thus we need to identify marginal cost from an equilibrium model of nonlinear pricing competition we estimate these price cost margins using quarterly data from the early u s cellular telephone industry between 1984 and 1988 our results indicate that the margins are increased under duopoly due to a significant reduction in marginal costs moreover we find that the price cost margins vary over the consumption levels and that low end users are subject to higher price cost margins than high end users the impact of competition further increases the margins in the low end user segment relative to high end users in that sense the benefits of competition which are largely due to increased efficiencies are passed on relatively more to high end users we also show that these findings are robust even if one includes a number of observable market demand and cost variables jel d43 d82 l96

an international review of the implications of regulatory and electricity market structures on the emergence of grid scale electricity storage abstract energy storage systems ess have the potential to make a significant contribution to planning and operation practises in power systems while ess can be used to provide multiple benefits in the power sector widespread use has been restricted by high technology costs lack of deployment experience and the barriers and uncertainties caused by the present electricity market and regulatory structures that were designed for conventional electricity systems this paper reviews countries with high renewable targets and with significant current or planned ess deployments to ascertain the common problems affecting the use of ess on the grid and to establish where changes have been made or proposed to the electricity market and regulatory frameworks three major problems were identified as the undetermined asset class for ess and unbundled electricity system limiting stakeholders from determining and realising multiple ess benefits low electricity market liquidity and changing market conditions and a lack of common standards and procedures for evaluating connecting operating and maintaining ess based on the established barriers recommendations to update or create policies regulation and market arrangements to increase the viability and wider use of grid level ess are discussed the three key regulatory and policy recommendations were identified as an alignment of renewable policies to that of ess creating a separate asset class for ess and associated rules for regulated and competitive operations and standardising assessment frameworks connection and operational procedures for the use of ess finally three main electricity market recommendations include updating rules to support simultaneous ess operation across wholesale ancillary services and capacity markets updating market rules to allow compensation for flexible and highly accurate responsive demand and generation technologies such as ess and updating market ancillary services energy requirements

robust permanent income and pricing i suppose there exists an extremely powerful and if i may so speak malignant being whose whole endeavours are directed toward deceiving me rene descartes meditations ii 1

explaining asset prices with external habits and wage rigidities in a dsge model in this paper i investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation or catching up with the joneses see abel 1990 to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts along the way i derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a rather general preference specification of habit formation by imposing consistency with long run growth the leisure share the aggregate frisch elasticity of labor supply the observed risk free rate and the observed sharpe ratio i show that a dsge model with exogenous and lagged habits in both leisure and consumption but not necessarily with additional persistence is well capable of matching the observed asset market facts as well as macro facts provided one allows for moderate real wage stickiness and provided one allows for sufficient curvature on preferences as dictated by the asset market observations without wage stickiness delivery on both the asset pricing implications as well as the macroeconomic implications seems to be much harder

developing pathways for energy storage in the uk using a coevolutionary framework abstract a number of recent techno economic studies have shown that energy storage could offer significant benefits to a low carbon uk energy system as it faces increased challenges in matching supply and demand however the majority of this work has not investigated the real world issues affecting the widespread deployment of storage this paper is designed to address this gap by drawing on the systems innovation and socio technical transitions literature to identify some of the most important contextual factors which are likely to influence storage deployment specifically it uses a coevolutionary framework to examine how changes in ecosystems user practices business strategies institutions and technologies are creating a new selection environment and potentially opening up the energy system to new variations of storage for both electricity and heat the analysis shows how these different dimensions of the energy regime can coevolve in mutually reinforcing ways to create alternative pathways for the energy system which in turn have different flexibility requirements and imply different roles for storage technologies using this framework three pathways are developed user led decentralised and centralised which illustrate potential long term trajectories for energy storage technologies in a low carbon energy system

noncontractible heterogeneity in directed search this paper provides a directed search model designed to explain the residual part of wage variation left over after the impact of education and other observable worker characteristics have been removed workers have private information about their characteristics at the time they apply for jobs firms value these characteristics differently and can observe them once workers apply they hire the worker they most prefer however the characteristics are not contractible so firms cannot condition their wages on them this paper shows how to extend arguments from directed search to handle this allowing for arbitrary distributions of worker and firm types the model is used to provide a functional relationship that ties together the wage distribution and the wage duration function this relationship provides a testable implication of the model this relationship suggests a common property of wage distributions that guarantees that workers who leave unemployment at the highest wages also have the shortest unemployment duration this is in strict contrast to the usual and somewhat implausible directed search story in which high wages are always accompanied by higher probability of unemployment

a competitive distribution of auctions in this paper a competitive distribution of auctions is described for an economy consisting of an infinite number of buyers and sellers all of whom differ according to their valuation for the single indivisible object being traded a competitive distribution of auctions is such that no seller can improve his profits by deviating to any alternative direct mechanism it is shown that the competitive distribution of auctions will have the property that each buyer and seller s best reply is independent of his beliefs about the tastes of other buyers and sellers on the market the purpose of this paper is to provide an equilibrium for an economy in which sellers compete by offering different direct mechanisms to buyers no attempt is made to give a complete characterization of all possible equilibria rather we focus on one equilibrium in which the contracts that are offered by sellers in equilibrium and buyer s behaviour under these contracts are both independent of traders beliefs about one another the equilibrium illustrates one of the reasons why contracts that are employed in practice may not be as finely tuned to beliefs as the theory of mechanism design says that they should be the answer is simply that contracts are not offered in a vacuum sellers in the model studied in this paper need to compete with one another in order to attract buyers highly tuned mechanisms tend to extract buyer surplus in such an environment sellers are able to attract many buyers by offering to use cruder mechanisms that leave some surplus for buyers in this paper sellers are allowed to have different costs for the commodity that is being traded nonetheless the equilibrium for the limit economy in which there are infinitely many buyers and sellers is such that every seller offers a second price auction and publicizes a reserve price equal to his cost in a standard monopoly auction the optimal reserve price for the seller exceeds his cost by an amount that depends on his beliefs about buyers valuations myerson 1981 a seller who raises his reserve price has his profits affected in two distinct ways by raising his reserve price the seller makes it unprofitable for some buyer types to participate in his auction the seller therefore loses any surplus that he might have earned by trading with these buyers the buyers who still find it profitable to participate in the seller s auction will end up having to pay a higher price when they win because of this increase in the seller s reserve price this means that the seller will be able to extract a bit more surplus from buyers who continue to participate the seller raises the reserve price until the marginal cost associated with raising the reserve price is just equal to the marginal gain associated with the ability to extract more surplus from remaining buyers competition mitigates this argument since there is a limit to the amount of surplus that the seller can extract from remaining buyers before they decide that they should instead choose one of the alternative auctions that are being held on the market with

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

disasterization a simple way to fix the asset pricing properties of macroeconomic models a central difficulty in economics is to create a model with both good business cycle properties and asset pricing properties i show how to solve this difficulty by a simple portable modeling device the disasterization of models take an economy with good business cycle properties and create a new disasterized economy which is essentially identical to the original one except that disasters can destroy part of the capital stock and productivity in such a disasterized economy asset prices exhibit high and volatile risk premia but macro variables remain unchanged perturbations of this benchmark allow for feedback from finance to macro

quality based price discrimination and tax incidence the market for gasoline and diesel cars in europe the existing tax policies toward gasoline and diesel cars in european countries provide a unique opportunity to analyze quality based price discrimination and the implied tax incidence in my econometric framework consumers choose the type of engine based on their annual mileage prices are set by the manufacturers the relative pricing of gasoline and diesel cars appears to be consistent with monopolistic price discrimination effectively segmenting low mileage from high mileage consumers on average about 75 to 90 of the price differentials between gasoline and diesel cars can be explained by markup differences i draw implications for the effectiveness and the revenue effects of tax policy

measuring the impact of market coupling on the italian electricity market abstract this paper evaluates the impact on the italian electricity market of replacing the current explicit auction mechanism with market coupling maximising the use of the cross border interconnection capacity market coupling increases the level of market integration and facilitates the access to low cost generation by consumers located in high cost generation countries thus it is expected that a high priced area such as italy could greatly benefit from the introduction of this mechanism in this paper the welfare benefits are estimated for 2012 under alternative market scenarios employing the optimal dispatch model elfo the results of the simulations suggest that the improvement in social surplus is likely to be significant especially when market fundamentals are tight