Using Supervised Environmental Composites in Production and Efficiency Analyses: An Application to Norwegian Electricity Networks

Luis Orea, Christian Growitsch and Tooraj Jamasb

No 2012-18, EWI Working Papers from Energiewirtschaftliches Institut an der Universitaet zu Koeln (EWI)

Abstract: Supervised dimension reduction methods have been extensively applied in different scientific fields like biology and medicine in recent years. However, they have hardly ever been used in micro economics, and in particular cost function modeling. Nonetheless, these methods can also be useful in regulation of natural monopolies such as gas, water, and electricity networks, where firms’ cost and performance can be affected by a large number of environmental factors. In order to deal with this ‘dimensionality’ problem we propose using a supervised dimension reduction approach that aims to reduce the dimension of data without loss of information. Economic theory suggests that in the presence of other relevant production (cost) drivers, the traditional all-inclusive assumption is not satisfied and, hence, production or cost predictions (and efficiency estimates) might be biased. This paper shows that purging the data using a partial regression approach allows us to address this issue when analyzing the effect of weather and geography on cost efficiency in the context of the Norwegian electricity distribution networks.

Keywords: supervised composites; environmental conditions; electricity networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L15 L51 L94 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2012-12-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-eur, nep-net and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/cms/wp-content/upload ... ental_Composites.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Using Supervised Environmental Composites in Production and Efficiency Analyses: An Application to Norwegian Electricity Networks (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:ewikln:2012_018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EWI Working Papers from Energiewirtschaftliches Institut an der Universitaet zu Koeln (EWI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sabine Williams ().