Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time,...

This paper employs meta-analysis to aggregate and systematically analyze the mixed empirical evidence on the determinants of corporate hedging reported in 132 previously published studies covering data from more than 73,000 firms. Among the fourteen proxy variables analyzed by multivariate...

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

This paper focuses on classifying market access for long-distance passenger rail services in Europe into three main models and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each of these models. The 'Tendered Concessions' model aims to introduce competition for the market by which operators are...

This paper applies parametric and non-parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in Germany. We address traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence...

This paper examines firm-level productivity for German electricity retailers using a structural production function approach. The sector was subject to fundamental changes in market structure after retail liberalization in 1998. Competition was supposed to increase productivity and reduce retail...

In this paper we analyze the investment behavior of electricity distribution companies. First, we test the hypothesis if the implementation of an incentive-based regulatory scheme with revenue caps impacts the firms' investment decisions in general. Second, we test if the specific regulatory...

A considerable share of public investment comes not only from public budgets but also from public utility companies. One major area of investment is energy and water supply, where the utility companies have substantial fixed assets in the form of distribution infrastructure. Using new microdata...

We analyze the effects of an incentive based regulatory scheme with revenue caps on the investment behaviors and decisions of 109 electricity distribution companies operating in Germany in 2006-2012. We hypothesize that Germany's implementation of incentive regulation in 2009 has a negative...