10th Online Seminar in Finance: Thomas Schmid, University of Hong Kong
The Institute of Finance at PUEB is pleased to announce the 10th Online Seminar in Finance.
Speaker: Thomas Schmid, HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Title: How Does Green Energy Affect Electricity Prices?
Abstract: How does the increasing penetration of wind and solar plants (which I refer to as green energy, GE) affect electricity prices? One possibility is that the near-zero marginal production cost of GE reduce wholesale electricity prices in markets, which is based on the marginal cost of the most expensive plant that is required to satisfy demand. Alternatively, GE could crowd out other generation technologies with low production cost, leading to higher average prices due to the weather-dependent nature of GE. Using hourly prices for electricity from 51 wholesale markets, I find that prices increase with GE penetration. However, this effect is driven by reverse causality: analyzing planned power plants reveals no evidence for crowding out effects, but firms’ incentives to invest in capital-intensive GE plants increase with electricity prices. Using weather-dependent GE generation instead of the endogenous installed capacity shows that GE leads to lower, not higher electricity prices.
Date: June 16th, 2023, 11:00 (Warsaw time)
Speaker’s bios: Dr. Thomas Schmid is an Associate Professor in Finance at the HKU Business School at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining, he finished his dissertation in Finance and worked as Post-Doctoral Researcher at Technische Universität München. His main research area is empirical corporate finance. He works on projects investigating the impact of labor rights, operating flexibility, and product market characteristics on firms’ financing decisions. His articles have been published in, for example, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and Journal of Banking and Finance.
To register, please click here: https://forms.gle/D8mZWmXn6kSuVEQ68*
Registration deadline: June 14th, 20:00 (Warsaw time). The invitation to the Teams webinar will be sent on June 15st
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