Deregulation policy has caused some changes in the concepts of power systems reliability assessment and enhancement. In this paper, generation reliability is considered, and a method for its assessment using intelligent systems is proposed. Also, because of power market and generators’ forced outages stochastic behavior, Monte Carlo Simulation is used for reliability evaluation. Generation r...

Carsharing operators, which rent out electric vehicles for minutes or hours, lose money on idle vehicles. We develop a model that allows carsharing operators to offer the storage of these vehicles on operating reserve markets (market for quickly rampable back-up power sources that replace for instance failing power plants). We consider it a dispatch and pricing problem with the tradeoff between...

The US economy experienced excessive demand for housing for over a decade, causing a housing boom. Consumers went on a spending spree driven by higher and higher, real and perceived home equity values, as well as equity market increases. In the US market, “bigger is better” or “as much as one can afford” became the mentality of home buyers. In addition, consumers were driven to buy houses now t...

As the banking industry has consolidated in recent years, the number of banking organizations in the U.S. and in the Twelfth Federal Reserve District has declined dramatically.This consolidation trend raises public policy issues because of its implications for concentration and therefore competition in local banking markets. Specifically, mergers between banks in the same local market increase ...

It is often the case that banks in the US are willing to borrow in the fed funds market (the interbank market for funds) at higher rates than the ones they could obtain by borrowing at the Fed’s discount window. This phenomenon is commonly explained as the consequence of the existence of a stigma effect attached to borrowing from the window. We provide a model where market participants may rega...

Two features common to many auctions are the use of reserve prices and the existence of secondary markets for the goods being sold. Even in simple symmetric settings, the combination of these features can preclude existence of an equilibrium in symmetric separating bidding strategies. With a reserve price sufficiently far below the maximum (endogenous) valuation, a symmetric equilibrium still e...

Sandra E. Black is an economist in the Research and Market Analysis Group, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The opinions expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect opinions of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. How competition affects the ability of companies to favor particular groups is a longstanding issue in the economics literature. In ...

A quantitative framework is developed to bring forward the insurance motive for holding international reserves. The insurance value of reserves is quantified as the market price of an equivalent option that provides the same insurance coverage as the reserves. This quantitative framework is applied to calculating the cost of a regional insurance arrangement (e.g. an Asian Monetary Fund) and to ...

Reserve requirements have been part of the regulator)' apparatus of banking in the United States for more than a century and a half. No matter what their original purpose may have been, maintaining the burden of reserve requirements needs a contemporary rationale that can justify the problems they create. The problems attributed to reserve requirements are woven into the fabric of financial mar...

The original analysis of sponsored search auctions by Varian and independently by Aggarwal et al. did not take into account the notion of reserve prices, which are common across all major search engines. We investigate this further and show that the separability assumption derived by Aggarwal et al. is not sufficient for aligning the greedy allocation employed by GSP and the efficient allocatio...