This article presents an empirical study of market power in the British electricity industry. Estimates of price-cost markups are derived using direct measures of marginal cost and several approaches that do not rely on cost data. Since two suppliers facing inelastic demand dominate the industry, most oligopoly models predict prices substantially above marginal costs. All estimates indicate that prices, while higher than marginal costs, are not nearly as high as most theoretical models predict. Regulatory constraints, the threat of entry, and financial contracts between the suppliers and their customers are considered as possible explanations for the observed price levels.

As both a regulator and an academic, Fred Kahn argued that end-use electricity consumers should face prices that reflect the time-varying marginal costs of generating electricity. This has been very slow to happen in the US, even in light of recent technological advances that have lowered costs and improved functionality for meters and automated demand response technologies. We describe these recent developments and discuss the remaining barriers to the proliferation of time-varying electricity pricing.

Current forecasts suggest that the vast majority of growth in energy demand will come from the developing world, and that China will play a major part in that growth. This paper presents evidence suggesting that the shape of the income distribution, which is typically omitted from forecasting models, plays a major role in driving household acquisition of energy-using durable goods in rural China. We use province-level data for rural households to show that the share of the population living above the poverty line is an important determinant of household appliance holdings even controlling for average household income.

While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many US electric generating plants. Our estimates of input demand suggest that publicly owned plants, whose owners were largely insulated from these reforms, experienced the smallest efficiency gains, while investor-owned plants in states that restructured their wholesale electricity markets improved the most. The results suggest modest medium-term efficiency benefits from replacing regulated monopoly with a market-based industry structure.

We study how contracting and monitoring structures in public procurement affect large-scale infrastructure construction. Starting in 2016, Kenya’s public electric utility ran competitive auctions and then awarded and administered dozens of procurement contracts to connect millions to electricity. The causal analyses leverage natural and experimental variation and granular, independentlycollected construction quality data. Kenya Power contracts funded by the World Bank featured unbundled contract components known as ‘design-bid-build’ and enhanced monitoring compared to African Development Bank-funded contracts. Unbundling contracts delayed construction progress but improved quality. Randomized inspections improved quality without large delays. Bundled contracting with additional independent monitoring could improve outcomes.

We study household decisions to acquire energy-using assets in the presence of rising incomes. We develop a theoretical framework to characterize the effect of income growth on asset purchases when consumers face credit constraints. We use large and plausibly exogenous shocks to household income generated by the conditional-cash-transfer program in Mexico, Oportunidades, to show that asset acquisition is nonlinear, depends, as predicted in the presence of credit constraints, on the pace of income growth, and both effects are economically large among beneficiaries. Our results may help explain important worldwide trends in the relationship between energy use and income growth.