Southern Economic Journal
The Southern Economic Journal® (SEJ) is a publication of the Southern Economic Association. The SEJ began its publication in 1933 and it is the 8th oldest American academic journal in the economic profession. It is indexed in the Internet Index of Periodicals & Public Affairs Information Services, Journal of Economic Literature, and SSI.
Charles Courtemanche of University of Kentucky serves as the Editor of the SEJ. All inquiries related to the manuscript submission and review process can be directed to the Office of the Editor at sej@southerneconomic.org. All inquiries related to submission payments can be directed to the Office of the Secretary/Treasurer at admin@southerneconomic.org.
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Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Symposium: Demand Growth, Energy Security, and the Economics of Electricity Markets
The Southern Economic Journal invites submissions for a symposium on Demand Growth, Energy Security, and the Economics of Electricity Markets.
For most of the past two decades, U.S. electricity demand was essentially flat, and the central economic question was how to decarbonize a system of roughly stable size. This has now changed as data centers and electrified transport and heat add load that is large, lumpy, and concentrated in particular places. In many other countries, rapid industrialization and expanding energy access are doing the same. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine and instability in the Middle East have made energy security a first-order driver of industrial competitiveness and household welfare. Rising shares of intermittent renewable generation have also exposed the limits of market institutions built for dispatchable thermal fleets.
The symposium is organized around a single question: how do electricity markets, and the institutions that govern them, perform when decarbonization collides with rapid demand growth and elevated risk, and who bears the resulting costs? We seek papers that contribute to economics rather than descriptive policy commentary. That means credible identification, well-specified theory, transparent structural modeling, and careful welfare analysis. Work from a range of countries and institutional settings is welcome, as is work that will interest researchers in industrial organization, public, development, urban and regional, and labor economics. Papers should speak to the organizing question rather than to energy topics generally.
The symposium welcomes theoretical, empirical, structural, and experimental contributions addressing topics including:
• Demand growth and new large loads: who pays for interconnection, generation, and network upgrades; the local labor market, fiscal, housing, land-use, water, and environmental effects of where large loads locate; demand flexibility and system costs; behind-the-meter generation and co-location contracts.
• Energy security and geopolitical shocks: how fuel and wholesale price shocks pass through to retail prices, output, employment, and firm exit; the welfare and distributional effects of price caps, windfall taxes, subsidies, and rationing; switching between fuels and the cost of security; critical minerals and supply-chain dependence; whether security goals speed up or slow down decarbonization.
• Market design, reliability, and distribution under high renewables: capacity markets, scarcity pricing, and resource adequacy; storage, transmission, and interconnection queues; retail rate design and fixed-cost recovery; outages, extreme weather, and resilience; energy burdens and who is exposed to price and reliability risk; electricity markets in low- and middle-income economies.
Submission Instructions: Manuscripts should be submitted through the Southern Economic Journal‘s regular online submission portal. When submitting, authors should indicate that the manuscript is intended for the “Symposium on Demand Growth, Energy Security, and the Economics of Electricity Markets” so that it can be identified for symposium consideration.
All submissions will be subject to the Southern Economic Journal‘s regular peer-review process, and submission does not guarantee inclusion in the symposium.
Submission deadline: April 30, 2027
Guest Editors:
Dakshina G. De Silva (Lancaster University)
Georgia Kosmopoulou (University of Oklahoma)
Jayash Paudel (University of Oklahoma)
Anita R. Schiller (Lancaster University)
Aurélie Slechten (Lancaster University).