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
    ---><---

    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. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    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. Severin Borenstein & James Bushnell & Christopher R. Knittel & Catherine Wolfram, 2008. "Inefficiencies And Market Power In Financial Arbitrage: A Study Of California'S Electricity Markets," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 56(2), pages 347-378, June.
    2. 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.
    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. 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.
    5. 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).
    6. 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.
    7. Kellogg, Ryan & Wolff, Hendrik, 2007. "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from an Australian Experiment," IZA Discussion Papers 2704, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Kellogg, Ryan & Wolff, Hendrik, 2008. "Daylight time and energy: Evidence from an Australian experiment," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 207-220, November.
    9. Choi, Jaewon & Kronlund, Mathias & Oh, Ji Yeol Jimmy, 2022. "Sitting bucks: Stale pricing in fixed income funds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(2), pages 296-317.
    10. Enrique Alberola & José Manuel Marqués, 2001. "On the Evolution of Relative Prices and Its Nature at the Regional Level: The Case of Spain," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(3), pages 451-474, August.
    11. Alex Ilek & Tanya Suchoy & Nir Klein, 2006. "Estimating the premium implicit in the yields of Treasury Bills," Israel Economic Review, Bank of Israel, vol. 4(2), pages 53-83.
    12. Chang, Eric C. & Cheng, Joseph W. & Khorana, Ajay, 2000. "An examination of herd behavior in equity markets: An international perspective," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(10), pages 1651-1679, October.
    13. Narayan, Seema & Narayan, Paresh Kumar & Tobing, Lutzardo, 2021. "Has tourism influenced Indonesia’s current account?," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 225-237.
    14. Stephen Brown & William Goetzmann & Bing Liang & Christopher Schwarz, 2008. "Mandatory Disclosure and Operational Risk: Evidence from Hedge Fund Registration," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2785-2815, December.
    15. Aslanidis, Nektarios & Christiansen, Charlotte, 2012. "Smooth transition patterns in the realized stock–bond correlation," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 454-464.
    16. Croce, M.M. & Nguyen, Thien T. & Raymond, S. & Schmid, L., 2019. "Government debt and the returns to innovation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(3), pages 205-225.
    17. Cho, Guedae & Kim, MinKyoung & Koo, Won W., 2003. "Relative Agricultural Price Changes In Different Time Horizons," 2003 Annual meeting, July 27-30, Montreal, Canada 22249, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    18. Bansal, Ravi & Kiku, Dana & Yaron, Amir, 2016. "Risks for the long run: Estimation with time aggregation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 52-69.
    19. Antonio Rubia & Trino-Manuel Ñíguez, 2006. "Forecasting the conditional covariance matrix of a portfolio under long-run temporal dependence," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(6), pages 439-458.
    20. David Hirshleifer & Danling Jiang, 2010. "A Financing-Based Misvaluation Factor and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(9), pages 3401-3436.

    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.