Measuring Productivity When Technologies are Heterogeneous: A Semi-Parametric Approach for Electricity Generation

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple technologies. Using a metafrontier Malmquist decomposition and frontier estimation based on stochastic non-smooth envelopment of data (StoNED) allows for productivity estimation with few microeconomic assumptions. Additionally, evaluation of productivity at representative hypothetical units permits distribution-free analysis for the whole distribution of power plant sizes. The proposed framework is used to analyze a unique and rich dataset of coal, lignite, gas, and biomass-fired generators operating in Germany from 2003 to 2010. The results indicate stagnating productivity for the sector as a whole, technical progress for biomass plants, and very high productivity for gas-fired plants

Economic Evidence in Antitrust: Defining Markets and Measuring Market Power

This paper addresses an important aspect of the interdisciplinary collaboration between law and economics: the use antitrust courts can and should make of empirical industrial organization economics, in light of the expansion of empirical knowledge generated during the last few decades. First we show how courts can apply what economists have learned about identification of alternative theories of industry structure and firm strategy to the problems of defining markets and determining whether market power has been exercised. We emphasize that the same analytic issues arise regardless of whether the evidence on these concepts is quantitative or qualitative. Second we show how courts can adopt a strategy employed in the research literature, by exploiting generalizations across closely related industries to help evaluate evidence and resolve cases. We also discuss ways of increasing the institutional capacity of the judicial system to make use of these two bodies of economic learning. These include a possible limited role for neutral economic experts in litigation, and a role for the antitrust enforcement agencies in identifying and codifying relevant generalizations about industries from the empirical economic literature to make that learning available to courts