Market completeness: how options affect hedging and investments in the electricity sector.

The high volatility of electricity markets gives producers and retailers an incentive to hedge their exposure to electricity prices by buying and selling derivatives. This paper studies how welfare and investment incentives are affected when an increasing number of derivatives are introduced. It develops an equilibrium model of the electricity market with risk averse firms and a set of traded financial products, more specifically: a forward contract and an increasing number of options. We first show that aggregate welfare (the sum of individual firms' utility) increases with the number of derivatives offered, although most of the benefits are captured with one to three options. Secondly, power plant investments typically increase because additional derivatives enable better hedging of investments. However, the availability of derivatives sometimes leads to ‘crowding-out’ of physical investments because capital is being used more profitably to speculate on financial markets. Finally, we illustrate that players basing their investment decisions on risk-free probabilities inferred from market prices, may significantly overinvest when markets are not sufficiently complete.

On the Pricing of Intermediated Risks: Theory and Application to Catastrophe Reinsurance

We model the equilibrium price and quantity of risk transfer between firms and financial intermediaries. Value-maximizing firms have downward sloping demands to cede risk, while intermediaries, who assume risk, provide less-than-fully-elastic supply. We show that equilibrium required returns will be "high" in the presence of financing imperfections that make intermediary capital costly. Moreover, financing imperfections can give rise to intermediary market power, so that small changes in financial imperfections can give rise to large changes in price. We develop tests of this alternative against the null that the supply of intermediary capital is perfectly elastic. We take the US catastrophe reinsurance market as an example, using detailed data from Guy Carpenter & Co., covering a large fraction of the catastrophe risks exchanged during 1970-94. Our results suggest that the price of reinsurance generally exceeds "fair" values, particularly in the aftermath of large events, that market power of reinsurers is not a complete explanation for such pricing, and that reinsurers' high costs of capital appear to play an important role.

A strategic approach to hedging and contracting

This paper provides a new rationale for hedging that is based partly on noncompetitive behavior in product markets. The authors identify a set of conditions that imply that a firm may want to hedge. Empirically, these conditions are consistent with what is observed in the marketplace. The conditions are: 1) firms have some market power in their product market; 2) firms have limited liability; and 3) firms can contract to sell their output at a specified price before all factors that can affect their profitability are known. For some parameter specifications, however, the model predicts that firms will not want to hedge. This is important as the hedging results since, in practice, a large fraction of firms do hedge their cash flows, but a substantial number do not.Hedging (Finance)

Managing unilateral market power in electricity

This paper first describes those features of the electricity supply industry that make a prospective market monitoring process essential to a well-functioning wholesale market. Some of these features are shared with the securities industry, although the technology of electricity production and delivery make a reliable transmission network a necessary condition for an efficient wholesale market. These features of the electricity supply industry also make antitrust or competition law alone an inadequate foundation for an electricity market monitoring process. This paper provides examples of both the successes and failures of market monitoring from several international markets. More than 10 years of experience with the electricity industry restructuring process has shown that market failures are more likely and substantially more harmful to consumers than other market failures because of how electricity is produced and delivered and the crucial role it plays in the modern economy. Wholesale market meltdowns of varying magnitudes and durations have occurred in electricity markets around the world, and many of them could have been prevented if a prospective market monitoring process backed by the prevailing regulatory authority had been in place at the start of the market.Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy Markets,Economic Theory&Research

Essays on the effective integration of risk management with operations management decisions

textIn today's marketplace, firms' exposure to business uncertainties and risks are continuously increasing as they strive to meet dynamically changing customer needs under intensifying competitive pressures. Consequently, modern supply chains are continuously evolving to effectively manage these uncertainties and the allied risks through both operational and financial hedging strategies. In practice, firms extensively use operational hedging strategies such as operational flexibility, capacity flexibility, postponement, multi-sourcing, supplier diversification, component commonality, substitutability, transshipments and holding excess stocks as operational means for risk management. On the other hand, financial hedging which involves buying and selling financial instruments, carrying large cash reserves or adopting conservative financial policies, changes the cash flow stream of the firms and may help to reduce the firms exposure to business risks and uncertainties. Overall, in this dissertation we explore how risk management can be integrated with operating decisions so as to improve the firm value creating more wealth for the shareholders. In the first essay, we focus on capacity flexibility as a means of operational hedging for risk management in an MTO production environment under demand uncertainty. We demonstrate that capacity flexibility may not only be used to hedge against the demand uncertainty, but may also be employed to effectively protect against possible suboptimal operating decisions in the future. In the second essay, we focus on operational hedging in financially constrained startup firms when making short-term production and long-term investment decisions. We provide an analytical characterization of the optimal investment and operating decisions and analyze the impact of market parameters on the operations of the firm. Our findings highlight an interesting operational hedging behavior between the process investment decisions and the short-term production commitments of the firm when they are faced with financial constraints. Our third essay focuses on the value of integrated financial risk management activities by publicly traded established firms under the risk of incurring financial distress cost. Different from the existing operations management literature, we study the risk management by a public corporation within the value framework of finance; hence our findings do not require any specific assumptions about the investors' utility functions. Moreover, we contribute to the operations management research by examining the impact of the costs of financial distress on hedging and operating plans of the firm. Overall, in this dissertation, we examine the effective integration of operational and financial risk management so as to improve the firm value creating more wealth for the shareholders.Information, Risk, and Operations Management (IROM

Derivatives and Default Risk

Upstream producers that possess market power, sell forwards with a lengthy duration to regional electricity companies (REC). As part of the liberalization of the electricity market, RECs have been privatized and exposed to a possible bankruptcy threat if spot prices have fallen below their expected value. The downstream firms’ expected profit is larger, when it is less likely to be bailed out, the effect on upstream profits is ambiguous while consumers loose. Options are less welfare increasing than forwards, but the difference is minimal. In the presence of bankruptcy, options are the preferred welfare maximizing market instrument

Insufficient Incentives for Investment in Electricity Generation

In theory, competitive electricity markets can provide incentives for efficient investment in generating capacity. We show that if consumers and investors are risk averse, investment is efficient only if investors in generating capacity can sign long-term contracts with consumers. Otherwise the uncovered price risk increases financing costs, reduces equilibrium investment levels, distorts technology choice towards less capital-intensive generation and reduces consumer utility. We observe insufficient levels of long-term contracts in existing markets, possibly because retail companies are not credible counter-parties if their final customer can switch easily. With consumer franchise, retailers can sign long-term contracts, but this solution comes at the expense of the idea of retail competition. Alternative capacity mechanisms to stimulate investment are discussed

Exchange rate and market power in import price

This study consists of three papers in the area of international market analysis, as listed in Chapter 1, 2, and 3. Each paper has its own issue and application, but the main theme behind these papers is to figure out interactions of international firms\u27 real decisions with respect to changes in financial variables or structure attributing to the firms\u27 behaviors. The papers focus especially on a risk-averse international firm\u27s decision model with respect to fluctuations in exchange rates;The first two papers relate the international firm\u27s ex-ante real decision to the portfolio theory in correspondence to recent importance of managing risk. Chapter 1 deals with interactions between diversification strategy and currency hedging by futures contracts when a competitive & risk-averse importing agent chooses optimal import quantities and hedging levels under dual uncertainties of price and exchange rate. The resulting total import level under the scheme depends significantly on the degree of correlation among relevant currencies; that is because the currency hedging virtually determines the covariance effect of portfolio variance. Chapter 2 introduces another risk-diversification model in determining the input mixture within a framework of the capital-asset-price-model. The Chinese wheat import market is empirically analyzed to justify this portfolio approach and to explain potential conflicts between the buyer\u27s risk diversification efforts and suppliers\u27 market power. While concentrating on the risk reduction effect, these papers support hedging roles of currency futures contracts among the advanced markets in Chapter 1 and of diversification strategy in importing non-homogenous products in Chapter 2;As an illustration of the market structure related to demand functions, Chapter 3 deals with the topic of pass-through in terms of the oligopoly pricing conduct in the market. To find out the nature of demand convexity, this study draws several testable implications and also evaluates an empirical example of the import beer pricing in the US. Given the open debate on the stability of the level of pass-through, a Kalman filter estimation is adapted in the empirical application