A COST FUNCTION FOR THE NATURAL GAS TRANSMISSION INDUSTRY: FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS

摘要

This article studies the cost function for the natural gas transmission industry. In addition to a tribute to H.B. Chenery, it firstly offers some further comments on a recent contribution (Yepez 2008): a statistical characterization of long-run scale economies and a simple reformulation of the long-run problem. An extension is then proposed to analyze how the presence of seasonally varying flows modifies the optimal design of a transmission infrastructure. Lastly, the case of a firm that anticipates a possible random rise in its future output is also studied to discuss the optimal degree of excess capacity to be built into a new transmission infrastructure.