Weekly Energy Economics Paper Monitor

2026-02-22 to 2026-03-24

Weekly Brief

This weekly digest tracks newly published papers from selected journals and free metadata feeds, with a primary focus on energy economics across demand, supply, markets, prices, policy, and forecasting. Climate-sensitive demand, exposure, adaptation, and specialized empirical approaches are treated as important subthemes rather than hard requirements.

Report Window 2026-02-22 to 2026-03-24
Papers Identified 37
Highlighted Below 7
Journals Checked 7

This week's shortlist centered on Energy demand, supply, markets, and policy and Micro evidence and empirical design, with 37 relevant papers identified and 7 highlighted below.

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Key Themes This Week

A quick overview of the main ideas that shaped this reporting window.

34

Energy demand, supply, markets, and policy

The strongest papers this week focused on core energy-economics questions around demand, supply, pricing, market design, and policy.

3

Micro evidence and empirical design

Several papers used household-, firm-, or regional-level evidence to study behavior, heterogeneity, and policy incidence in energy-economics settings.

Weekly Synthesis

The sections below bring the most relevant papers together with short editorial summaries and direct links.

Energy demand, supply, markets, and policy

This week's most relevant papers concentrated on core questions in energy demand, supply, prices, and policy.

Welfare Impact of Virtual Trading on Wholesale Electricity Markets

The Energy Journal | 2026-03-06

We use welfare analysis to evaluate the efficiency impact of virtual trading by financial participants on wholesale electricity markets. We use a stylized model to determine the optimal bidding strategy under different scenarios of market outcomes for financial participants. A welfare comparison between scenarios with and without optimal bidding shows that the main impacts of virtual trading by financial participants are welfare transfers between consumers and producers, while the impact on total surplus is...

Micro evidence and empirical design

The most useful micro and empirical papers this week provided micro-level evidence on energy behavior, pricing, and policy incidence.

Target Leverage and Cost of Capital in the Electricity Sector: Implications for Valuation and Public Policy

The Energy Journal | 2026-02-27

This paper examines the factors that influence the target capital structure of electricity firms and proposes a protocol for estimating and applying target leverage in the sector. The target capital structure is crucial to the weighted average cost of capital (WACC), which impacts firm valuation, capital budgeting, and regulatory policies, thereby balancing investor returns with consumer tariffs. While prior energy finance literature has focused on the cost of equity, capital structure has often been overlooked....

Past Reports

Browse earlier digests to see which journals and topics surfaced in previous weeks.

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