Following the liberalisation of the electricity industry since the early 1990s, many sector regulators have recognised the potential for cost efficiency improvement in the networks through incentive regulation aided by benchmarking and productivity analysis. This approach has often resulted in...

Investment in electricity networks, as regulated natural monopolies, is among the highest regulatory and energy policy priorities. Given the large scale of required investments in the coming years, impelled by the need for decarbonising the electricity sector, identifying investment drivers of...

Efficiency and productivity analysis is a central concept in incentive-based regulation of network utilities. However, the efficiency measures obtained from benchmarking predominantly reflect short term performance and hence, provide only a snapshot of the firm's path towards its long run...

Europe is liberalising electricity in accordance with the European Commission’s Electricity Directives. Different countries have responded differently, notably in the extent of restructuring, treatment of mergers, market power, and vertical unbundling. While Britain and Norway have achieved...

Extending the basic model of two-stage cumulative innovation with asymmetric information to include `experimentation' by second-stage rms, we nd that the costs of a strong (versus weak) intellectual property (IP) regime may be substantially increased. In addition, these costs increase as...

The Low Pay Commission is the institution created in 1997 to introduce Britain’s first National Minimum Wage. The paper places the Commission in historical perspective and provides a summary assessment of the initial impact of the Minimum Wage. It describes and analyses the development of the...

There has been much controversy over the merits of government regulation to protect growers and franchisees from hold-up at the hands of integrators and franchisors. Typically, economic argument have discouraged regulation, since direct evidence for hold-up is weak and bargaining should yield...

We provide a conceptual framework to analysis counterfactual scenarios using macroeconometric models. We consider UK entry to the euro. We derive conditional probability distributions for the difference between the future realisations of variables of interest subject to UK entry restrictions...

This paper provides a synthesis and further development of a global modelling approach introduced in Pesaran, Schuermann and Weiner (2004), where country specific models in the form of VARX* structures are estimated relating a vector of domestic variables to their foreign counterparts and then...