At the NBER Summer Institute in a couple of weeks, a new paper of mine, co-authored with Frank Wolak (Stanford), analyses the 2004 partial acquisition of Victorian electricity generator, Loy Yang A, by AGL, an electricity retailer. You may recall that the ACCC famously challenged that acquisition but was knocked back by the Federal Court; largely because the prospective econometrics was hard to sort out.

Our paper improves on the prospective theory and forecast with a far more sophisticated model than was used in that case. It still predicts price rises. But what is more, enough time has passed that we can actually see whether prediction became reality. The paper suggests that it did and you can read it for yourself but I wont be driving that result hard until we go through some peer review.