The aim of this paper is to analyze the variation in empirical estimates of the income and price elasticities of energy demand. The evidence presented, through a meta-analysis, allows identification of the weighted average of the income and price elasticities, shows that the estimates are very heterogeneous, that there is publication bias, and that factors such as region, energy sector, among others, affect its volatility. The evidence also indicates that income elasticity in Latin America is greater than in the OECD countries, and that the price elasticity of energy demand is lower in Latin America than in the OECD countries. Therefore, continued economic growth in Latin America will be accompanied by a growth in energy demand. Moreover, the establishment of a tax in Latin America, under the current elasticities, is less effective and will be insufficient to control the increase in energy consumption. / El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la variación de las elasticidades ingreso y precio de la demanda de energía. La evidencia presentada, con un metaanálisis, permite identificar la media ponderada de estas elasticidades ingreso y precio, muestra que las estimaciones son muy heterogé- neas, que existe sesgo de publicación y que algunos factores como la región, el sector del consumo de energía, entre otros, inciden en su volatilidad. La evidencia también indica que la elasticidad ingreso en América Latina es mayor que aquella de los países de la OCDE y, simultáneamente, que la elasticidad precio de la demanda de energía es menor en América Latina que en los países de la OCDE. Así, un crecimiento económico continuo en América Latina vendrá acompañado de un crecimiento de la demanda de energía y que el establecimiento de un impuesto en América Latina, bajo las actuales elasticidades, es menos efectivo y en general sería insuficiente para controlar el aumento del consumo de energía.

An evidence-based policy debate about future fuel demand requires reliable estimates for fuel price elasticities. Such predictions are often based on revealed preference (RP) data. However, this procedure will only yield reliable results in the absence of severe structural discontinuities. In order to overcome this potential limitation we used a situational stated preference (SP) survey to estimate the response to hypothetical fuel price changes beyond the scope of previous observations. We elicit fuel price elasticities for price increases up to four Euros per liter and find that the situational approach predicts the actual responses to previously observed fuel price changes very well. We conclude that applying a situational approach is particularly useful, if behavioral predictions for unprecedented (non-monetary) policy interventions or supply side shocks are of interest that go beyond the reach of standard RP approaches.

This thesis comprises three papers examining the impact of competitive pricing or competition on participants in energy markets. The scope of each paper is narrow but focused, dealing with one particular aspect of competition in each market under study. It is hoped that results from these three studies could provide valuable policy lessons to public policy makers in their task to create or maintain competition in different energy markets, so as to improve efficiencies in these markets. The first and second papers examine the load shifting behavior of industrial customers in Ontario under real time pricing (RTP). Using Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) data from 2005 to 2008 and industry-level consumption data from all industrial customers directly connected to the transmission grid, the first paper adopts a Generalized Leontief specification to obtain elasticities of substitution estimates for various industry groups, while the second paper adopts a specification derived from standard consumer theory to obtain price elasticity estimates. The findings of both papers confirm that in some industries, industrial customers who are direct participants of the wholesale market tend to shift consumption from peak to off-peak periods in order to take advantage of lower off-peak prices. Furthermore, in the first paper, a demand model is estimated and there is evidence that the marginal effect of hourly load on hourly price during peak periods is larger than the marginal effect during off-peak periods. An important policy implication from the results of these papers is that while RTP is currently limited to industrial customers, it does have positive spillover effects on all consumers. The third paper uses a unique panel dataset of all retail gasoline stations across five Canadian cities from late-2006 to mid-2007 to examine the effect of local competition on market shares and sales of individual stations. The base empirical specification includes explanatory variables representing the number of same brand stations and the number of different brand stations within a 3km radius to identify brand affiliation effect. It is found that the number of local competitors is negatively correlated with market share and sales. More interestingly, a same brand competitor has a larger marginal impact on market share and sales than a competitor of a different brand. These findings suggest that additional local competition leads to cannibalization of market share among existing stations, rather than create new demand. Another implication is that relying only on the number of different brands operating within a geographic market could understate the competition intensity in the local market.

This thesis comprises three papers examining the impact of competitive pricing or competition on participants in energy markets. The scope of each paper is narrow but focused, dealing with one particular aspect of competition in each market under study. It is hoped that results from these three studies could provide valuable policy lessons to public policy makers in their task to create or maintain competition in different energy markets, so as to improve efficiencies in these markets. The first and second papers examine the load shifting behavior of industrial customers in Ontario under real time pricing (RTP). Using Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) data from 2005 to 2008 and industry-level consumption data from all industrial customers directly connected to the transmission grid, the first paper adopts a Generalized Leontief specification to obtain elasticities of substitution estimates for various industry groups, while the second paper adopts a specification derived from standard consumer theory to obtain price elasticity estimates. The findings of both papers confirm that in some industries, industrial customers who are direct participants of the wholesale market tend to shift consumption from peak to off-peak periods in order to take advantage of lower off-peak prices. Furthermore, in the first paper, a demand model is estimated and there is evidence that the marginal effect of hourly load on hourly price during peak periods is larger than the marginal effect during off-peak periods. An important policy implication from the results of these papers is that while RTP is currently limited to industrial customers, it does have positive spillover effects on all consumers. The third paper uses a unique panel dataset of all retail gasoline stations across five Canadian cities from late-2006 to mid-2007 to examine the effect of local competition on market shares and sales of individual stations. The base empirical specification includes explanatory variables representing the number of same brand stations and the number of different brand stations within a 3km radius to identify brand affiliation effect. It is found that the number of local competitors is negatively correlated with market share and sales. More interestingly, a same brand competitor has a larger marginal impact on market share and sales than a competitor of a different brand. These findings suggest that additional local competition leads to cannibalization of market share among existing stations, rather than create new demand. Another implication is that relying only on the number of different brands operating within a geographic market could understate the competition intensity in the local market.

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Une des particularités du marché des compagnies aériennes est la grande divergence des prix des billets pour les mêmes vol. Cela reflète principalement l'incapacité des entreprises à modifier facilement les volumes de production et/ou à les stocker. Le développement et l'utilisation des modèles de "yield management" (modèles d'attribution des sièges) ont été centrés sur les compagnies aériennes proposant différents types de tarifs pour un même vol. L'objectif de cette thèse est de construire un certain nombre de modèles économiques pour expliquer la dispersion des prix sur le marché du transport aérien à partir de différents points de vue. Dans le chapitre 3, je crée un modèle de prix direct qui explique comment différentes caractéristiques du produit et du consommateur influencent le niveau de prix. Le chapitre 4 est consacré aux différences de niveau de prix du point de vue de la concurrence. Dans un jeu stratégique où les entreprises se font concurrence, ! 'ensemble de stratégies rationalisables pour chaque joueur implique toutes les meilleures réponses aux décisions des autres. Ce chapitre propose un test empirique de l'existence de l'équilibre de Nash unique dans un oligopole de Cournot. Dans le chapitre 5, je traite le marché des passagers aériens comme un marché différenciant les produits et applique un modèle logit multinomial pour calculer les élasticités-prix. Le modèle logit (mettant particulièrement l'accent sur l'hétérogénéité des consommateurs) estime de quelle manière les différentes caractéristiques du produit influencent les parts de marché. / Nowadays one of peculiarities of the liberalized airline market is a huge divergence of ticket prices for the same flights. Mostly it reflects the companies' being unable to easily change the volumes of production or/and store them. The development and use of the yield management models (seat allocation models) have centered on airlines offering a variety of different types of fares for travel on the same flight. The goal of this dissertation is to construct a number of economic models to explain the price dispersion on the airline market from the different points of view. In Part 3, I create a direct price mode! which explains how different product and consumer characteristics influence the price level. It is shown how different attributes like the moment of ticket reservation, ticket class, weekday of the departure and number of coupons define the price and how it corresponds to the consumer characteristics (gender, income, age, etc.). Part 4 is devoted to the differences of the price level from the competition point of view. In a strategic game where firms compete against each other the set of rationalizable strategies for each player entails ail the best responses to the others' decisions. This chapter proposes an empirical test of the existence of the unique Nash equilibrium in a Cournot oligopoly. In Part 5 I treat an airline passenger market as a market with the product differentiation and apply a multinomial logit model to calculate price elasticities. The logit model (with a special focus on the consumers heterogeneity) estimates how the different product characteristics influence the market shares.

This dissertation contributes to the literature and current discussions on the European postal markets and the universal service obligations (USO). It consists of three independent chapters.<p><p>In chapter one, we investigate the consumers' preferences for various kinds of postal services. As such, we begin by reviewing the market and regulatory conditions for Europe and for our case study, Belgium. Then using data provided by the incumbent provider, the Belgian post (Bpost), we estimate demand price elasticities. The data comprises customer transactional information on letter mail, direct mail, parcels & express services, press delivery and value added services for the 2008-2009 period. These categories constitute not only the important lines of services that Bpost offers to its clients but also the main segments that constitute the whole Belgian postal market. As such, and using standard methods, we estimate for each service an equation that explains demand by prices, product varieties (i.e. mixes or combinations of volume, weight, priority and destination, inter alia), income, regulation proxies and other socioeconomic variables. The estimated price elasticities for regulated and partially regulated services are around -1.1, whereas for unregulated segments they fluctuate between -2.1 and -2.8. The lowest price elasticity is obtained for direct mail services (-1.0); the highest ones are associated with value added services (-2.1) and registered mail (-3.3). Price elasticities may be influenced by the cyclical effects during the period of analysis. Therefore, elasticities are higher when compared with the empirical evidence obtained for other countries and through the various methodologies applied over the last decades. The fact that technological substitutes, such as expenditures on telephony and internet access for daily and administrative mail services and, radio and television advertising for direct mail services, could not be accounted for (because there were no data available) may however be considered as a major limitation for the scope of our results. <p><p>In the second chapter, we explore theoretically the effects of the USO on unregulated markets. In particular, we are interested in investigating its welfare effects when the provision of services cannot be technologically separated. We present a model in which there is an incumbent who provides two services: a universal service and a non-USO service, the latter opened to competition. This is the case of letter mail and direct (or bulk) mail, services which have quite different purposes and regulatory frameworks (i.e. the former is fully regulated whereas the latter is liberalized under the current European Internal Market framework), but are jointly produce at some stages of the postal value chain. The USO is simplified to two dimensions, affordability and quality, implemented as a price cap and a minimum quality standard (MQS) for the provision of letter mail services. The latter involves the technological aspects that we are interested in. We find that the definition of the USO plays an important role in organizing markets that are open to competition. When it imposes few quality requirements (low MQS), the incumbent is not cost efficient enough to provide the high-quality variant of bulk mail, allowing its competitors to cream-skim the segment. However, because there are cost economies, the firm's participation in the segment yields a higher average quality of mail services at lower prices. When the USO is too comprehensive (high MQS), the incumbent exhibits large cost economies that ensure a dominant position in the provision of bulk mail services. Consumers are worse off as competition induces too much service differentiation in order to make profitable the provision. Relaxing the definition of the USO mitigates the competitive advantage of the USP and so, yields improvements in welfare. In the absence of access costs, firms will find profitable to participate in the bulk mail segment. However, foreclosure happens if the USO induces the incumbent to exhibit significant fixed costs. Therefore, the USP may end up as the sole supplier of bulk mail services if the definition of the USO imposes too many quality requirements (high MQS). In that case, the authority must balance the welfare gains of defining USO with the welfare losses of the consumers of the contested service. <p><p>Finally, in the third chapter we consider the ownership aspect of the provision of universal services as an incentive to introduce competition. One can further segment the provision between services for customers located in high-cost areas and services for customers located in low-cost areas. Additionally, under the current EU legislation, the supply is divided between upstream activities (e.g. collection and sorting) and downstream activities (i.e. delivery). The provision of upstream activities in high-cost areas remains in hands of the incumbent firm or the owner of the downstream (delivery) network. The upstream provision in low-cost areas is open to competition, but a retailer may be vertically integrated/separated or legally unbundled with the downstream firm. Legal unbundling means, in our model, that the downstream firm and one upstream firm located in the low-cost area belong legally to the same entity entitled to all profits, whom does not have full control rights over the firms' decisions. That is to say, upstream activities and the downstream services will be managed separately under the same ownership. In this framework we analyze the firm's boundaries in terms of competition development and welfare. We implement two criteria to answer questions like, does vertical separation promotes competition (entry of firms) while covers a larger demand than vertical integration? Does vertical integration demand less public funds to cover demand? Does legal unbundling is worse than ownership separation to promote competition? The first criterion is the probability of entry (of the potential upstream firm), which we determine for each modes of ownership. The second criterion is the cost of public funds. It is implemented by defining a loss function as the difference between the expected consumer surplus when the downstream firm chooses an access fee that maximizes its profits and the consumer surplus when access is priced at marginal cost. The use of both criteria let us conclude that efficient entry occurs when the downstream firm is vertically separated or legally unbundled of the retailer providing services in the low-cost area. However, it is under legal unbundling that the access charge takes its lowest value. The highest cost of public transfers is obtained when firms are vertically separated, but the lowest one is attained when firms are legally unbundled. Therefore legal unbundling constitutes the preferred organizational form to induce competition and to reduce the cost of public funds. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished