There is a major policy debate within Europe and more widely on how to structure railway systems to enhance competition, whilst minimising costs. This is the first study in the academic literature to examine, using econometric methods, the cost impacts of three different approaches to...

This paper has aimed to provide information useful to policy makers involved in planning for the management of postal service. Five countries were selected?the UK, France, Germany, US and Japan?and the characteristics of their postal services were described in terms of regulation,...

By using the empirical method, this paper analyzes Japan' s ``special" post office and evaluates universal service obligation (USO) costs. With empirical analysis, we obtained the following results. First, the cost of the special post office is about 9.8% higher than that of the ``ordinal" post...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate, by using regressions analysis, the DR effect on households' electricity consumption. We employ three kinds of estimation models: a pooled OLS model, a random effect model, and a fixed effect model. Major results are as follows. First, the DR...

The main purpose of this study is to find the factors involved in determining private university tuition level. Furthermore, we test whether or not university tuition of prestigious (higher standard deviation score) private universities is lower than that of less prestigious private...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the difference between incentive effects and physical condition effects in electricity saving behaviors of households, by applying stochastic frontier models for the demand function. As for incentives, we consider both internal incentives such as...

This study aims to investigate two important issues: whether or not public infrastructure contributes to production in the private sector, and whether or not political economy factors such as political situations, lobbying factors, and the availability of national grants for investment affect...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate how regulation, competition, governance structure, and business diversification strategy affect the cost structure of firms. By using 358 observations comprised of public utility firms and manufacturing firms from 1989 to 2002, we estimate the...

The main purpose of this study is to estimate the optimal city size which would attain maximum total surplus and sustainability, or a city size in which total benefits would equal total costs. We apply regressions to the total benefit function and the total cost function for 269 employment...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate what kind of internal and external factors most affect a firm' s costs. We consider governance structure and business diversification strategy as internal factors and regulation and competition as external factors. By using 358 observations...