An end to support for renewables? The wrong battle to fight. CEPS Commentary, October 2013

On 11 October 2013, the CEOs of 10 large European energy utilities issued a warning that the European energy infrastructure is “in jeopardy” and called for an end to support for renewables on grounds that wind and solar were mature technologies that no longer required such support. Given the unlikelihood, however, that EU decision-makers would renege on their decarbonisation or renewable energy targets, Fabio Genoese asks in this commentary whether it would not be a better strategy for conventional generators to explore new business models built around a ‘reliability pricing system’, in which nearly 100% reliability would be guaranteed for base load but not for peak demand.

A Global Analysis of of Imperfect Competition in the Banking Systems and the Latest Israeli Regulation Dealing with Market Failures. ACES Working Paper No. 3, 2007

The high concentration of the banking sector is a cross-border phenomenon that has high impact on local and global economies. This paper's main goal is to analyze the factors that impact concentration in the banking systems around the globe. The innovation of this paper is that we combined economic, "economic environment", and culture variables as explanatory variables for this analysis. We found among other things that regulation in the banking system is helpful in order to keep it competitive. We also found that when the society has more individual values rather than collective ones, its banking sector is less concentrated. In the second part of the paper we focused on the Israeli case, showing that although recent indicators of the Israeli banking system indicate a higher level of concentration and lower level of competition, it seems that the recent trend is moving toward less concentration and higher competition.