Annalisa Vinella

Hydropower Management in Electricity Markets

With hydropower representing nearly 19 percent of the planet’s electricity, its management is a core dimension of energy policies worldwide. Ensuring a socially efficient hydropower management is a complex task because of the stochastic nature of water inflows, the possibility of storing water from one period to another as well as fluctuations in demand, all of which permit inter-temporal price discrimination and strategic manipulation of market outcomes. In her research project, Annalisa Vinella is seeking to characterise the socially efficient inter-temporal profile of hydropower production in conditions of inflow uncertainty and demand seasonality.

Ms Vinella’s research interests include public economics, contract theory, regulation, industrial organisation and energy economics. Using contract-theoretic models to investigate incentive issues in public investments, she has recently focussed on financing, contractual design and renegotiation of public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects. In connection with her work in this field, she has been invited to contribute to the BRICS Multilateral Development Bank Project promoted by the G24 and the GGGI. Her most recent article, “From Fixed to State-dependent Duration in Public-private Partnerships,” co-authored with Daniel Danau and forthcoming in Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, develops a normative analysis which establishes how the duration of a public-private partnership should be employed as an incentive tool to attain an efficient contractual performance.

Annalisa Vinella is Assistant Professor of Public Economics at the Department of Economics and Quantitative Methods of the University of Bari. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Bari as well as a PhD in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics. She was awarded a Jean Monnet fellowship from the European University Institute for a post-doctoral programme at Florence School of Regulation. She also received a Jemolo Fellowship co-funded by the Bank of Italy for a stay at Nuffield College, Oxford.