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The road towards the decarbonization of electricity leads to high deployment of low-carbon power sources including intermittent energy sources. In this context, flexible nuclear power plants could play a significant role because they do not produce CO2 emissions and under certain conditions flexible operation is necessary to ensure the stability of the electricity grid. Flexible nuclear reactors have the ability to load-follow the predicted fluctuations in demand. However, high fixed costs of nuclear production, tighter regulations since the Fukushima accident and the extensive participation of renewable sources in the energy mix challenge the economic profitability of nuclear production. Consequently, a question that arises is how nuclear power producers can manage flexible nuclear production in order to maximize their profits. We proved that optimal production behaviour is not characterized by constant nuclear production unless further investments in thermal capacity are realized. On the contrary, both nuclear and thermal production are flexible at the optimum level.

In this paper, we prove a new version of the Second Welfare Theorem for economies with a finite number of agents and an infinite number of commodities, when the preference correspondences are not convex-valued and/or when the total production set is not convex. For this kind of nonconvex economies, a recent result, obtained by one of the authors, introduces conditions which, when applied to the convex case, give for Banach commodity spaces the well-known result of decentralization by continuous prices of Pareto-optimal allocations under an interiority condition. In this paper, in order to prove a different version of the Second Welfare Theorem, we reinforce the conditions on the commodity space, assumed here to be a Banach lattice, and introduce a nonconvex version of the properness assumptions on preferences and the total production set. Applied to the convex case, our result becomes the usual Second Welfare Theorem when properness assumptions replace the interiority condition. The proof uses a Hahn-Banach Theorem generalization by Borwein and Jofre (in Joper Res Appl Math 48:169–180, 1997) which allows to separate nonconvex sets in general Banach spaces

International audience; In this paper, we study a discrete-time version of the Lucas model with externality but without physical capital. We give conditions for which the optimal human capital sequences are increasing. When the instantaneous utility function is isoelastic and the production function is Cobb-Douglas, we prove that the optimal human capital sequences grow at constant rate. Moreover, there exists a unique equilibrium which, under an additional assumption on the human capital technology, is also the unique competitive equilibrium.

This paper addresses existence of equilibria for an overlapping generations exchange economy with incomplete markets, one-period real assets and bounded short sales, defined on an infinite event-tree where there is a continuum of branches at each node of the tree. The demographic structure used in the paper is quite general and allows for infinite-lived as well as finite-lived agents.

The general equilibrium model with incomplete markets is here extended to infinite horizon economies populated by a finite number of infinitely lived agents. the crucial issue that divides the infinite horizon setting from the finite horizon setting is in the nature of borrowing constraints, which added to spot constraints, define a plausible budget set for individual agents. the paper relates seven alternative definitions of equilibrium and states corresponding equilibrium existence theorems when assets are one-period and purely financial.

We consider a general equilibrium model of an economy with increasing returns to scale or more general types of nonconvexity and without ordered preferences. Firms are instructed to set their prices according to general pricing rules which may depend on the production plans of other firms. We suppose, moreover, that the pricing rule of the firms verifies a condition of weak bounded losses. This includes the case of profit maximizing, average cost pricing and marginal (cost) pricing, thanks to a transformation used by Bonnisseau. The tastes of the consumers may depend both on other consumptions and on the prices This paper reports a general existence result in this model which extends the results of Bonnisseau and Cornet.