Committed to reform? Pragmatic antitrust enforcement in electricity markets

This thesis is a collection of essays about the instrumental use of commitment decisions to facilitate the completion of the European internal electricity market. European policy can shape markets in many ways, two most evident being regulation and competition enforcement. The interplay between these two instruments attracts a lot of scholarly attention. One of the major concerns in the competition vs. regulation debate is the instrumental use of competition rules. It has been observed that competition enforcement is triggered not only as a response to an anticompetitive harm occurring in the market, but that it sometimes becomes a powerful tool in the European Commission’s hands to pursue regulatory goals. This thesis looks for examples of such instrumentalisation in the context of electricity markets and finds that the Commission is very pragmatic in using all the possible instruments it has at hand to push forward its project of creating the internal electricity market. This includes regulation, competition enforcement and all sorts of political pressure. To the extent that commitment decisions accelerate sector-specific regulation and overcome political deadlocks, they contribute to the Commission’s energy policy goals. However, instrumentalisation of competition rules comes at a certain cost to competition policy, energy policy and, most importantly, to electricity markets themselves. Markets might be negatively affected either indirectly, by application of sector-specific regulation or competition policy building on previous commitment decisions, or directly, through the implementation of inadequate commitments in individual cases. Concluding, commitment decisions generally contributed to achieving the policy objectives of the internal electricity market, but their use for that purpose does not come without cost. Given that this cost is ultimately borne by the internal electricity market, the Commission should take a more balanced approach to the instrumental use of commitment decisions so that it does not do more harm than good.

From Craton to Rift: Empirically Based Ground-Truth Criteria for Local Events Recorded on Regional Networks

Region-specific empirically based ground-truth (EBGT) criteria used to estimate the epicentral-location accuracy of seismic events have been developed for the Main Ethiopian Rift and the Tibetan plateau. Explosions recorded during the Ethiopia-Afar Geoscientific Lithospheric Experiment (EAGLE), the International Deep Profiling of Tibet, and the Himalaya (INDEPTH III) experiment provided the necessary GT0 reference events. In each case, the local crustal structure is well known and handpicked arrival times were available, facilitating the establishment of the location accuracy criteria through the stochastic forward modeling of arrival times for epicentral locations. In the vicinity of the Main Ethiopian Rift, a seismic event is required to be recorded on at least 8 stations within the local Pg/Pn crossover distance and to yield a network-quality metric of less than 0.43 in order to be classified as EBGT5(95%) (GT5 with 95% confidence). These criteria were subsequently used to identify 10 new GT5 events with magnitudes greater than 2.1 recorded on the Ethiopian Broadband Seismic Experiment (EBSE) network and 24 events with magnitudes greater than 2.4 recorded on the EAGLE broadband network. The criteria for the Tibetan plateau are similar to the Ethiopia criteria, yet slightly less restrictive as the network-quality metric needs to be less than 0.45. Twenty-seven seismic events with magnitudes greater than 2.5 recorded on the INDEPTH III network were identified as GT5 based on the derived criteria. When considered in conjunction with criteria developed previously for the Kaapvaal craton in southern Africa, it is apparent that increasing restrictions on the network-quality metric mirror increases in the complexity of geologic structure from craton to plateau to rift. Accession Number: WOS:000322569200012

The SURTAVI model: proposal for a pragmatic risk stratification for patients with severe aortic stenosis

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a less invasive alternative to surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) for patients with symptomatic severe aortic stenosis (AS) and a high operative risk. Risk stratification plays a decisive role in the optimal selection of therapeutic strategies for AS patients. The accuracy of contemporary surgical risk algorithms for AS patients has spurred considerable debate especially in the higher risk patient population. Future trials will explore TAVI in patients at intermediate operative risk. During the design of the SURgical replacement and Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (SURTAVI) trial, a novel concept of risk stratification was proposed based upon age in combination with a fixed number of predefined risk factors, which are relatively prevalent, easy to capture and with a reasonable impact on operative mortality. Retrospective application of this algorithm to a contemporary academic practice dealing with clinically significant AS patients allocates about one-fourth of these patients as being at intermediate operative risk. Further testing is required for validation of this new paradigm in risk stratification. Finally, the Heart Team, consisting of at least an interventional cardiologist and cardiothoracic surgeon, should have the decisive role in determining whether a patient could be treated with TAVI or SAVR.