Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship...

We propose a price-cap mechanism for electricity-transmission expansion based on redefining transmission output in terms of financial transmission rights. Our mechanism applies the incentive-regulation logic of rebalancing a two-part tariff. First, we test this mechanism in a three-node network....

The purpose of this study is to analyze the cost efficiency of electricity distribution systems in order to enable regulatory authorities to establish price- or revenue cap regulation regimes. The increasing use of efficiency analysis in the last decades has raised serious concerns among...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can undertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g., by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...

This paper finds that coherent regulatory policies can boost investment in network industries of OECD economies. Rate-of-return regulation is generally thought to result in overinvestment, while incentive regulation is believed to entail underinvestment. Yet, previous empirical work has...

In January 2009 Germany introduced incentive regulation for the electricity distribution sector based on results obtained from econometric and nonparametric benchmarking analysis. One main problem for the regulator in assigning the relative efficiency scores are unobserved firm-specific factors...