When Does Regulation Distort Costs? Lessons from Fuel Procurement in US Electricity Generation: Comment
American Economic Review · 2021 · Jin Soo Han、Jean‐François Houde、Arthur van Benthem、Jose Miguel Abito
中文摘要
我们重新审视Cicala（2015）中的一个结果，并证明先前估计的燃料采购对美国电力重组的巨大且显著效应在存在离群值时并不稳健。使用来自稳健统计文献的方法论，我们估计该效应不到先前估计值的一半，且与零无统计差异。该稳健方法还将一家单一公司拥有的电厂识别为离群值，这些电厂的煤炭合同在关于重组的讨论甚至开始之前就已重新谈判。（JEL D83, O13, O33, Q16）
Abstract
We revisit one of the results in Cicala (2015) and show that the previously estimated large and significant effects of US electricity restructuring on fuel procurement are not robust to the presence of outliers. Using methodologies from the robust statistics literature, we estimate the effect to be less than one-half of the previous estimate and not statistically different from zero. The robust methodology also identifies as outliers the plants owned by a single company whose coal contracts were renegotiated before discussions about restructuring even started. (JEL D83, O13, O33, Q16)