Akshaya Jha, Carnegie Mellon University

 Firms expect to recover the xed costs required to start production by earning positive operating prots in subsequent periods. We develop a dynamic measure of competition that accounts for start-up costs, showing that static markups overstate the rents attributable to market power in an electricity market where power plants frequently stop and start production in response to output from solar panels. We estimate that increases in solar capacity correspond to increases in the aggregate operating prots earned by fossil-fuel plants because competition softens at sunset---plants displaced by solar during the day must incur start-up costs to compete in the evening.

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