Imperfect Markets And Imperfect Regulation

The first textbook to present a comprehensive and detailed economic analysis of electricity markets, analyzing the tensions between microeconomics and political economy. The power industry is essential in our fight against climate change. This book is the first to examine in detail the microeconomics underlying power markets, stemming from peak-load pricing, by which prices are low when the installed generation capacity exceeds demand but can rise a hundred times higher when demand is equal to installed capacity. The outcome of peak-load pricing is often difficult to accept politically, and the book explores the tensions between microeconomics and political economy. Understanding peak-load pricing and its implications is essential for designing robust policies and making sound investment decisions. Thomas-Olivier Léautier presents the model in its simplest form, and introduces additional features as different issues are presented. The book covers all segments of electricity markets: electricity generation, under perfect and imperfect competition; retail competition and demand response; transmission pricing, transmission congestion management, and transmission constraints; and the current policy issues arising from the entry of renewables into the market and capacity mechanisms. Combining anecdotes and analysis of real situations with rigorous analytical modeling, each chapter analyzes one specific issue, first presenting findings in nontechnical terms accessible to policy practitioners and graduate students in management or public policy and then presenting a more mathematical analytical exposition for students and researchers specializing in the economics of electricity markets and for those who want to understand and apply the underlying models.

This book is a collection of eleven papers concerned with the effects of market imperfections on the decision-making of economic agents and on economic policies that try to correct the inefficient market outcomes due to those imperfections. As a consequence, real and financial imperfections are related : economic decisions are simultaneously affected by imperfections present both in real and financial markets. Notwithstanding the obvious fact that market interdependence is not novel, scholar interests are typically concentrated on the specific relationship among economic decisions originating from particular imperfections. This explains why, in the case of perfect financial markets, we can speak of "the" us.

Achieving market consistency can be challenging, even for the most established finance practitioners. In Market Consistency: Model Calibration in Imperfect Markets, leading expert Malcolm Kemp shows readers how they can best incorporate market consistency across all disciplines. Building on the author's experience as a practitioner, writer and speaker on the topic, the book explores how risk management and related disciplines might develop as fair valuation principles become more entrenched in finance and regulatory practice. This is the only text that clearly illustrates how to calibrate risk, pricing and portfolio construction models to a market consistent level, carefully explaining in a logical sequence when and how market consistency should be used, what it means for different financial disciplines and how it can be achieved for both liquid and illiquid positions. It explains why market consistency is intrinsically difficult to achieve with certainty in some types of activities, including computation of hedging parameters, and provides solutions to even the most complex problems. The book also shows how to best mark-to-market illiquid assets and liabilities and to incorporate these valuations into solvency and other types of financial analysis; it indicates how to define and identify risk-free interest rates, even when the creditworthiness of governments is no longer undoubted; and it explores when practitioners should focus most on market consistency and when their clients or employers might have less desire for such an emphasis. Finally, the book analyses the intrinsic role of regulation and risk management within different parts of the financial services industry, identifying how and why market consistency is key to these topics, and highlights why ideal regulatory solvency approaches for long term investors like insurers and pension funds may not be the same as for other financial market participants such as banks and asset managers.

The free unfolding of market forces through deregulation and privatization has become a key issue of socio-economic policies all over the world. The policy initiatives have brought about a lively debate on the pros and cons of markets, state regulations and associational activity. The public policy debate has, however, been cut off from the related discussions in a variety of academic disciplines on the relation between institutions, markets and economic performance. As Boyer and Hollingsworth note: We are witnessing a major paradox. Governments are relying more and more upon markets in order to solve the many difficult issues which they are confronting, at the very moment when theorists are discovering that the efficiency of markets is restricted to a very small set of products.' This book is an interdisciplinary theoretical reflection on the relation between social institutions and societal cultures on the one hand and the (economic) performance of markets on the other. We will use findings and insights from different disciplines to discuss the deregulation policy program. Firstlyl, we will critical investigat on some of the assumptions that underlie these neo-liberal politics. Secondly, we will present the findings of some policy studies that have compared deregulation policies in different countries and policy fields: two policy fields taken from social policy (occupational health and safety, and vocational training) and one case study of a country that has gone far with deregulation policies, New Zealand. Thirdly, we will analyze some possibly unforeseen consequences of deregulation policies.

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

This book in microeconomics focuses on the strategic analysis of markets under imperfect competition, incomplete information, and incentives. Part I of the book covers imperfect competition, from monopoly and regulation to the strategic analysis of oligopolistic markets. Part II explains the analytics of risk, stochastic dominance, and risk aversion, supplemented with a variety of applications from different areas in economics. Part III focuses on markets and incentives under incomplete information, including a comprehensive introduction to the theory of auctions, which plays an important role in modern economics.