Article
Electricity Market Deregulation and Environmental Regulation: Evidence from U.S. Nuclear Power
Energy Economics
(2019)
Abstract
Nuclear power in the United States provides substantial electricity supply and thus this study replicates the finding in Davis and Wolfram (2012) that divestiture leads to a statistically significant and economically meaningful increase in nuclear power reactor output. Divestiture is the sale of generating assets from regulated, investor-owned utilities to independent power producers with the profit motive to increase output. The divestiture effect result is robust to specification choice and testing with an extended dataset containing additional years of observations. This study also finds the new result that reactor output increases via an indirect environmental policy mechanism. The environmental regulations considered occurred contemporaneously to the divestitures and thus provides a further robustness check on the divestiture effect result.
Keywords
- Nuclear Power,
- Electricity Markets,
- Deregulation,
- Environmental Policy,
- Replication
Disciplines
Publication Date
August 22, 2019
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2019.104500
Citation Information
"Electricity Market Deregulation and Environmental Regulation: Evidence from U.S. Nuclear Power" Energy Economics (2019) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/daniel_karney/13/