We analyze the current regulatory regime for electricity transmission in Germany, which combines network planning with both cost-plus and revenue-cap regulations. After reviewing international experiences on transmission investment, we first make a qualitative assessment of the overall German...

To date, the distributive implications of incentive regulation on electricity transmission networks have not been explicitly studied in the literature. More specifically, the parameters that a regulator might use to achieve distributive efficiency under price-cap regulation have not yet been...

This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service...

We revisit key elements of European power market design with respect to both short term operation and longer-term investment and re-investment choices. For short term markets, the European policy debate focuses on the definition of common interfaces, like for example gate closure time. We argue...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

Many industries are seeing an increase in concentration, leading to a discussion on the effectiveness of horizontal merger enforcement. The policy debate shows that one of the key arguments put forward when supporting potential mergers is the possibility of realization of merger efficiency...

This paper assesses the relative efficiency of knowledge production in the OECD using a nonparametric DEA approach. Resources allocated to R&D are limited and should therefore be used efficiently given the institutional and legal constraints. This paper presents efficiency scores based on an...

High growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and considered to be precursors of economic growth. We investigate how product- and labor-market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, affect HGF development across European regions....

A fundamental question regarding the design of electricity markets is whether adding auctions to the continuous intraday trading is improving the performance of the market. To approach this question, we assess the experience with the implementation of the 3 pm local auction for quarters in...

This paper analyzes the process of power utility re-regulation in Eastern Europe and the CIS during the decade of systemic transformation (1990-1999); in particular, it explores reasons why early attempts to introduce competition-oriented reform models have not succeeded. We discuss advantages...