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Steve Cicala Profile picture
Steve Cicala
@SteveCicala
Associate Professor, Tufts University Department of Economics Substack: https://t.co/7xitykLNlJ
Jul 19, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
To complement @ben_moll's excellent thread on EU firms and households substituting away from gas, here are some examples of governments actively discouraging adaptation to scarcity.

They're using taxpayer funds to make the problem worse.

Germany in March: 30 cents off gasoline & 15 cents off diesel.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Feb 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This is not even close to a proportional response, and pretending it is invites further aggression.

The EU has made itself exceptionally vulnerable to Russian gas supplies, and this goes a long way towards explaining why they are behaving so pathetically

A quick energy thread: This article does an excellent job summarizing the problem: It's not simply that the EU relies too heavily on Russian gas.

They have allowed Gazprom to control storage on EU territory.

washingtonpost.com/business/energ…
Jan 28, 2022 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
🚨 In today's American Economic Review: 🚨

Imperfect Markets versus Imperfect Regulation in U.S. Electricity Generation When I first started learning about electricity markets, I was surprised to learn that we used such dramatically different processes to keep the lights on in the US:

In some places, utility engineers do it as they always have, in others they run auctions.
Dec 30, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
There's an important paper on automation and inequality out today in AEJ:Macro.

It's elegant, it has kickstarted research on automation, and yet it's also under-appreciated.

So here's an appreciation thread: Image Before Hemous & Olsen, we thought about skill-biased technological change (SBTC) as something that enhanced the productivity (and increased the wages) of high-skill workers.

Productivity growth among a subset of workers raises inequality.
Mar 31, 2021 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
🚨 Some new results from my work on deregulation out today in the AER: 🚨

Ungated version here: stevecicala.com/papers/fuel_di… In my 2015 AER, I examined *when* regulation distorts costs by looking at the prices power plants paid for fuel.
Feb 26, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I'm glad to see a discussion of the culture in economics seminars. A little history (and possibly folklore) on how we got here: Why "We don't clap." The possible folklore part is that the modern economics seminar format has its roots at @UChi_Economics. At least that's what people there say. They weren't seminars, they were workshops.

The difference is that in a workshop all participants were expected to have read the paper.
Feb 21, 2021 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
With most outages over, wholesale prices back to normal, and some truly shocking bills coming due, the policy discussion regarding the #TexasBlackout is ramping up. Some thoughts: "Texas has a deregulated electricity sector. They failed to keep the lights on. Therefore Texas must regulate electricity." We're going to hear this a lot. We hear the opposite argument whenever a regulatory agency is found to be asleep at the switch (ahem, @US_FDA).
Feb 19, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
ERCOT stands out a bit. This is comparing realized hourly load against predicted load based on the weather, time of day, day of week, etc. etc. ERCOT reports this for 8 different weather zones, and many markets break their total system load into separate areas, so about 100 are plotted here.
Dec 18, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Some new results that highlight the stress that American households and businesses are currently under: Utility disconnections and fees in IL.

Thread: ImageImage This spring the Illinois Commerce Commission requested zip code-level statistics from utilities on a variety of metrics, including disconnections, disconnection notices, fees, and deferred-payment agreements.

More info here: icc.illinois.gov/notice-of-inqu…
Mar 27, 2020 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
A thread on what electricity consumption in the US is foreshadowing for COVID-19's economic impact: Image The data are still coming together, but the pictures are sufficiently clear and consistent across multiple sources that it's worth sharing these numbers with the caveat that revisions may change the picture for individual areas substantially. Apologies for hasty formatting.
Mar 18, 2020 • 22 tweets • 7 min read
My ongoing work on electricity consumption as an economic indicator in the @WSJ by @russellgold. I will keep this thread going with updates...

wsj.com/articles/plung… Here is raw electricity consumption in Northern Italy by hour of week. The top curve is the week before any regional quarantines were instituted. The middle curve is last week. The bottom is this week. This is all raw data with no temperature adjustment. Image
Jul 9, 2018 • 38 tweets • 6 min read
🚨 New* Research Alert: 🚨
My older work on peer effects with a larger message on the limits of randomized control trials when your treatment isn't what you think it is. In the August JEEA (@EEANews)

Thread:

*`new' in econ publication, or geological time. Suppose you had a theory that there are peer effects in occupational choice--that it's `contagious'--how else to explain why there are so many agricultural workers in Napa Valley, but computer scientists a few short miles away in Silicon Valley?