Primary Program
About
Frederic is professor emeritus, Fox School of Business, Temple University, where he taught for 30 years. He was a visiting researcher fellow at KAPSARC where he is participating in the development of energy models and writing policy analyses in a range of areas, including domestic energy use in Saudi Arabia, market power in world oil markets, designing and managing income stabilization funds, and China's and India's energy economies. He works mainly in the area of energy-market forecasting and energy policy analysis. Prior to joining Temple, he was at the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Federal Energy Administration, where he headed the group that did the economic impact analyses of the bills and laws passed during the Carter administration and developed and ran the forecasting models then used for policy analyses and the forecasts in the EIA Annual Report. He has authored over 100 refereed articles. In one study he was ranked in the 20 most published researchers in his field over a fifty-year span. He was the editor in chief of the journal Interfaces, an area editor for Operations Research, and the Informs Journal on computing, and the Vice President of Publications for INFORMS and its predecessor society, Operations Research Society of America. He has been involved in studying local economic policy issues, including advising the Tax Reform Commission of the City of Philadelphia, estimating the impact on jobs of building casinos in Philadelphia, and political redistricting. He also did a queueing study oil tank vessels on the Delaware River.
Publications
28 April 2020
Optimal Policies for Managing Oil Revenue Stabilization Funds: An Illustration Using Saudi ArabiaWe develop an analytical approach that offers insights into how governments can better manage an oil-revenue stabilization fund. The model maximizes the expected intertemporal utility of households and consists of decisions that are a function of the fund level and oil revenue. We ap...
03 February 2019
The Costs and Gains of Policy Options for Coordinating Electricity Generation in the Gulf Cooperation CouncilWe investigate the economic impacts of policies for coordinating electricity production in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) through electricity trade. The GCC countries have installed a network of high-voltage transmission lines that links Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar...
01 January 2019
The Economic Impact of Price Controls on China’s Natural Gas Supply ChainDespite significant progress made by China in liberalizing its natural gas market, certain key areas such as market access and pricing mechanisms remain controlled by the government.
05 December 2017
Can adoption of rooftop solar panels trigger a utility death spiral? A tale of two U.S. citiesThe growing penetration of distributed energy generation (DEG) is causing major changes in the electricity market. One key concern is that existing tariffs incentivize ‘free riding’ behavior by households, leading to a cycle of rising electricity prices and DEG adoption, thereby erod...
01 June 2017
How do Price Caps in China’s Electricity Sector Impact the Economics of Coal, Power and Wind? Potential Gains from ReformsChina imposes maximum prices by plant type and region on the electricity that generators sell to utilities. We show that these price caps create a need for subsidies and cross-subsidies, and affect the economics of wind power. We model the price caps using a mixed complementarity for...
01 April 2017
Efficient industrial energy use: The first step in transitioning Saudi Arabia’s energy mixIn Saudi Arabia, industrial fuel prices are administered below international prices and firms make decisions based on low energy prices, increasing domestic energy demand. This analysis explores alternative policies designed to induce a transition to a more efficient energy system by...
05 November 2016
A tutorial on building policy models as mixed-complementarity problemsAfter 50 years of development, building and solving mixed-complementarity problems (MCPs) have become commonplace for policy models that analyze markets. These models are used to develop policies that reshape markets, or introduce markets that replace other organizational forms. In t...
01 November 2016
Economic impacts of debottlenecking congestion in the Chinese coal supply chainThe fast pace of development in China’s coal industry created bottlenecks in its transportation infrastructure. These bottlenecks likely affected not only China’s domestic coal market, but also global coal markets. In this paper, we estimate the costs and consequences of ...
01 May 2015
Lowering Saudi Arabia’s fuel consumption and energy system costs without increasing end consumer pricesUsing a multi-sector equilibrium model of the Saudi energy system that handles administered prices in a mixed-complementarity formulation, we present results from a set of policy scenarios that lower oil consumption in the country. Some of these scenarios are the solutions to Mathema...
