The paper studies the impact of government budget constraint in a pure adverse selection problem of monopoly regulation …. The government maximizes total surplus but incurs some cost of public funds. An alternative to regulation is proposed in …-post with the private firms. This ex-post contracting set-up allows more flexibility than traditional regulation where …

The paper aims at empirically investigating the relationship between regulation and the capital structure of the …

-of-return regulation is generally thought to result in overinvestment, while incentive regulation is believed to entail underinvestment …. Yet, previous empirical work has generally found that the introduction of incentive regulation has not systematically …-of-return regulation because investment decisions (what can be included in the rate base) are usually evaluated in a discretionary manner …