Universität zu Köln

Malischek, Raimund (2016). Essays in Energy Economics. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

This thesis presents four essays in energy economics. The first essay investigates one of the workhorse models of resource economics, the Hotelling model of an inter-temporally optimizing resource extracting firm. The Hotelling model provides a convincing theory of fundamental concepts like resource scarcity, but very few empirical validations of the model have been conducted. This essay attempts to empirically validate the Hotelling model by first expanding it to include exploration activity and market power and then using a newly constructed data set for the uranium mining industry to test whether a major resource extracting mining firm in the industry is following the theory’s predictions. The results show that the theory is rejected in all considered settings. The second and third essays investigate the difference in market outcomes under spot-market based trade as compared to long-term contract based trade in oligopolistic markets with investments. The second essay investigates analytically the difference in market outcomes in an electricity market setting, showing that investments and consumer welfare may be higher under spot-market based trade than under long-term contracts. The third essay proposes techniques to solve large-scale models of this kind, empirically, by exploring the practicability of this approach in an application to the international metallurgical coal market. The final essay investigates the influence of policy uncertainty on investment decisions. With France debating the role of nuclear technology, this essay analyses how policy uncertainty regarding nuclear power in France may feature in the French and European power sector. Applying a stochastic model for the European power system, the analysis shows that the costs of uncertainty in this particular application are rather low compared to the overall costs of a nuclear phase-out.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Malischek, Raimund raimund.malischek@gmail.com UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-70827
Date:	25 October 2016
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences
Divisions:	Externe Einrichtungen > An-Institute > Associated Institutes of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences > Institute for Energy Economics
Subjects:	Economics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language Power, Coal, Nuclear, Modelling, Energy Market Modeling, Optimization, Market Power, Cournot, Hotelling Model, Resources UNSPECIFIED
Date of oral exam:	25 October 2016
Referee:	Name Academic Title Höffler, Felix Prof. Dr. Lindenberger, Dietmar PD Dr.
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/7082