The EU faces challenges in reforming the Gas and Electricity Directives to implement the single market in electricity and gas. The Paper argues that there is unfinished business in the areas of regulation, restructuring, encouraging proper risk management through contracting, and designing...

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits across the state and is legally mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to...

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients. We examine whether this promise is...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effoort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

This paper offers a unique quantitative evaluation of the distribution of the welfare of a water privatization experience in Mali among labor, investors, intermediate input providers, users and taxpayers. The assessment is based on indicator duality and production theory. The paper shows that...

This Paper studies the objective function of state-owned banks. Using information on individual loan contracts, I compare the interest rate charged to two sets of companies with identical characteristics borrowing respectively from state-owned and privately owned banks. State-owned banks charge...

We develop a theoretical framework for comparing the style of work in public and private enterprises. We incorporate ‘socializing’, as an activity that yields utility for workers and affects a firm’s output, into a simple multitask model of work organization. In contrast with previous...

This Paper presents new data, in the form of several indices, on liberalization policies and the independence of regulators for a cross section of countries. These indices are combined with a comprehensive set of performance, institutional and political data to analyse both the determinants and...

This paper is an empirical investigation of unemployment rate series in 17 countries. The timing and size of shifts in the mean rate of unemployment are estimated. The size of the shifts and the remaining persistence in the unemployment rate series are then related to institutional differences...