We consider a firm that must undergo a costly and time-consuming regulatory process before making an irreversible, lagged investment whose value varies randomly. We analyze two cases: regulatory approval is valid forever or it expires after some time. We apply our model to Hydro Québec's...

Many network industries (telecommunications, electricity, natural gas, postal services, water and sewage services, etc.) are confronted with significant logistic and behavioral problems in their transition towards competition. In this article, I first recall some general principes and...

This paper examines how different rules for presentation of evidence affect verdicts in regulatory hearings and the welfare and efficiency properties these procedures exhibit. The hearing is modeled as a game of imperfect information in which the respondent is privately informed about validity...

We derive corrective tax rules when firms are oligopolists whose production processes generate emissions that add to a stock of pollution that accumulates over time. In our model, firms play dynamic Cournot games among themselves, and the government designs a tax rule that corrects for both the...

Economists have greatly criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants which may differ in terms both of their marginal abatement cost and marginal damage functions. Such a critic ignores however that the implementation of the standards may vary significantly across...

We address in this paper the problem of comparing and choosing among different policy instruments to implement the incentive objective of an efficient deterrence of environmental degradation and the remedy objective of an efficient clean-up of damages and a proper compensation of victims. Two...

Cette étude présente les fondements et les objectifs de la réglementation des entreprises au Canada. Un survol des principaux résultats théoriques en économie de la réglementation depuis les 10 dernières années et une analyse de la réglementation du type price-cap introduite en...

Financial market crises may differ, but severe banking crises typically share many common features. The most recent crisis shares many features with the US Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and early 90s as well as some features of the LTCM crisis of 1998. More generally, banking crises are...

The development of the canadian telecommunications web is significantly influenced by the regulatory framework put in place to oversee the evolution of the web toward a competitive system. This paper has two specific objectives: first, to develop a methodological framework, which will allow a...