Research
Research Interests
Financial Mathematics with Applications in Energy Markets
Optimal Regulation of Renewable Energy
Climate Finance
Publications
On Optimal Incentives for Renewable Investments and the Pricing of Electricity Swap Contracts (Dissertation at Bielefeld University, 2023)
In electricity markets, futures contracts typically function as a swap since they deliver the underlying over a period of time. In this paper, we introduce a market price for the delivery periods of electricity swaps, thereby opening an arbitrage-free pricing framework for derivatives based on these contracts. Furthermore, we use a weighted geometric averaging of an artificial geometric futures price over the corresponding delivery period. Without any need for approximations, this averaging results in geometric swap price dynamics. Our framework allows for including typical features as the Samuelson effect, seasonalities, and stochastic volatility. In particular, we investigate the pricing procedures for electricity swaps and options in line with Arismendi et al. (2016), Schneider and Tavin (2018), and Fanelli and Schmeck (2019). A numerical study highlights the differences between these models depending on the delivery period.
Preprints
We investigate the optimal regulation of energy production reflecting the long-term goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We analyze the optimal regulatory incentives to foster the development of non-emissive electricity generation when the demand for power is served either by a monopoly or by two competing agents. The regulator wishes to encourage green investments to limit carbon emissions, while simultaneously reducing intermittency of the total energy production. We find that the regulation of a competitive market is more efficient than the one of the monopoly as measured with the certainty equivalent of the Principal's value function. This higher efficiency is achieved thanks to a higher degree of freedom of the incentive mechanisms which involves cross-subsidies between firms. A numerical study quantifies the impact of the designed second-best contract in both market structures compared to the business-as-usual scenario. In addition, we expand the monopolistic and competitive setup to a more general class of tractable Principal-Multi-Agent incentives problems when both the drift and the volatility of a multi-dimensional diffusion process can be controlled by the Agents. We follow the resolution methodology of Cvitanić et al. (2018) in an extended linear quadratic setting with exponential utilities and a multi-dimensional state process of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. We provide closed-form expression of the second-best contracts. In particular, we show that they are in rebate form involving time-dependent prices of each state-variable.
In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the \textit{market price of risk for delivery periods} (MPDP) of electricity swap contracts. As introduced by Kemper et al. (2022), the MPDP arises through the use of geometric averaging while pricing electricity swaps in a geometric framework. In preparation for empirical investigations, we adjust the work by Kemper et al. (2022) in two directions: First, we examine a Merton type model taking jumps into account. Second, we transfer the model to the physical measure by implementing mean-reverting behavior. We compare swap prices resulting from the classical arithmetic (approximated) average to the geometric weighted average. Under the physical measure, we discover a decomposition of the swap's market price of risk into the classical one and the MPDP. In our empirical study, we analyze two types of models, characterized either by seasonality in the delivery period or by a term-structure effect, and identify the resulting MPDP in both cases.