Radioinactive: Do nuclear power plant outages in France affect the German electricity prices?

Do nuclear power plant outages in France affect the German electricity prices? In the case of the extensive inspections from October 2016 to February 2017 in 12 French nuclear power plants: Yes. This capacity shock increased the French electricity spot market price on average by 27.1%. The German-Austrian electricity spot market price was affected through cross-border trade. Due to increased electricity exports from Germany to France, the German-Austrian electricity spot market price increased on average by 3.2%. Moreover, due to decreased electricity imports from France to Germany, the German-Austrian electricity spot price increased on average by 7.6%. These results derive from a quasi-experimental approach based on coarsened exact matching, where the exogenous nature of the capacity shock is exploited as a random treatment in order to identify causal effects. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.