IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/itsdav/qt7fp26301.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inefficiencies and Market Power in Financial Arbitrage: A Study of California’s Electricity Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Borenstein, Severin
  • Bushnell, James
  • Wolfram, Catherine D

Abstract

As with other commodities, electricity is often traded on both forward and spot markets. This was initially true in the restructured California electricity industry from 1998 to 2000. Though the power traded in the forward and spot markets was for delivery at the same times and locations, prices often differed in significant and predictable ways. We consider several explanations for this apparent inefficiency, concluding that uncertainty about regulatory penalties for trading in the spot market caused most firms to avoid trading on inter-market price differences. The few firms that did carry out these trades did not find it profit-maximizing to eliminate the price differences. Skyrocketing prices in the summer of 2000, however, changed the major buyers’ (utilities’) incentives and increased the price differentials between the markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Borenstein, Severin & Bushnell, James & Wolfram, Catherine D, 2006. "Inefficiencies and Market Power in Financial Arbitrage: A Study of California’s Electricity Markets," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt7fp26301, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt7fp26301
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/7fp26301.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James B. Bushnell & Erin T. Mansur, 2005. "Consumption Under Noisy Price Signals: A Study Of Electricity Retail Rate Deregulation In San Diego," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(4), pages 493-513, December.
    2. Eric Zitzewitz, 2003. "Who Cares About Shareholders? Arbitrage-Proofing Mutual Funds," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(2), pages 245-280, October.
    3. Kaminsky, Graciela, 1993. "Is There a Peso Problem? Evidence from the Dollar/Pound Exchange Rate, 1976-1987," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(3), pages 450-472, June.
    4. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    5. David C. Parsley & Shang-Jin Wei, 1996. "Convergence to the Law of One Price Without Trade Barriers or Currency Fluctuations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(4), pages 1211-1236.
    6. Albert S. Kyle & Jean-Luc Vila, 1991. "Noise Trading and Takeovers," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 22(1), pages 54-71, Spring.
    7. Francis A. Longstaff & Ashley W. Wang, 2004. "Electricity Forward Prices: A High-Frequency Empirical Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 59(4), pages 1877-1900, August.
    8. Sanford J. Grossman & Oliver D. Hart, 1980. "Takeover Bids, the Free-Rider Problem, and the Theory of the Corporation," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 11(1), pages 42-64, Spring.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christopher Knittel & Catherine Wolfram & James Bushnell & Severin Borenstein, 2006. "Inefficiencies and Market Power in Financial Arbitrage: A Study of California?s Electricity Markets," Working Papers 630, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    2. Young Mok Choi & Kunsu Park, 2019. "Foreign Ownership, Agency Costs, and Long-Term Firm Growth: Evidence from Korea," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(6), pages 1-17, March.
    3. Getmansky, Mila & Lo, Andrew W. & Makarov, Igor, 2004. "An econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(3), pages 529-609, December.
    4. Gul, Ferdinand A. & Cheng, Louis T.W. & Leung, T.Y., 2011. "Perks and the informativeness of stock prices in the Chinese market," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(5), pages 1410-1429.
    5. Dasgupta, Amil & Fos, Vyacheslav & Sautner, Zacharias, 2021. "Institutional investors and corporate governance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112114, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Burkart, Mike & Panunzi, Fausto, 2006. "Agency conflicts, ownership concentration, and legal shareholder protection," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 1-31, January.
    7. Matthew Higgins & Egon Zakrajšek, 1999. "Purchasing power parity: three stakes through the heart of the unit root null," Staff Reports 80, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    8. Robert Marquez & Bilge Yılmaz, 2012. "Takeover Bidding and Shareholder Information," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(1), pages 1-27.
    9. Mike Burkart & Denis Gromb & Fausto Panunzi, 2006. "Minority Blocks and Takeover Premia," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 162(1), pages 32-49, March.
    10. Stefan Reitz & Jan-Christoph Rülke & Georg Stadtmann, 2009. "Are oil-price-forecasters finally right? – Regressive expectations towards more fundamental values of the oil price," WHU Working Paper Series - Economics Group 09-04, WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management.
    11. George Daskalakis, Lazaros Symeonidis, Raphael N. Markellos, 2015. "Electricity futures prices in an emissions constrained economy: Evidence from European power markets," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3).
    12. Dang, Thuy Duong & Hollstein, Fabian & Prokopczuk, Marcel, 2022. "How do corporate bond investors measure performance? Evidence from mutual fund flows," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 142(C).
    13. Koichiro Ito & Mar Reguant, 2016. "Sequential Markets, Market Power, and Arbitrage," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(7), pages 1921-1957, July.
    14. Francesca Cornelli & David D. Li, 2002. "Risk Arbitrage in Takeovers," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 15(3), pages 837-868.
    15. Katz, B.G. & Owen, J., 2000. "The Emergence of Concentrated Ownership and the Rebalacing of Portfolios due to Shareholder Activism in a Financial Market Equilibrium," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires ec-00-01, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    16. JamesR. Lothian & MarkP. Taylor, 2008. "Real Exchange Rates Over the Past Two Centuries: How Important is the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson Effect?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 118(532), pages 1742-1763, October.
    17. Peter Van Tassel, 2016. "Merger options and risk arbitrage," Staff Reports 761, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    18. Weron, Rafał & Zator, Michał, 2014. "Revisiting the relationship between spot and futures prices in the Nord Pool electricity market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 178-190.
    19. Bris, Arturo, 2002. "Toeholds, takeover premium, and the probability of being acquired," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 227-253, July.
    20. Boubaker, Sabri & Mansali, Hatem & Rjiba, Hatem, 2014. "Large controlling shareholders and stock price synchronicity," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 80-96.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    UCD-ITS-RP-09-02; Engineering;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt7fp26301. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/itucdus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.