This book brings together contributions of a distinguished panel of regulators as well as lawyers and economists from both academia and industry to present their insights on the digital convergence phenomenon in the telecommunications industry. The contributions cover a great deal of the...

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

Mehr als 1600 Verteilnetzbetreiber versorgen deutsche Haushalte mit Strom und Gas. Dabei handelt es sich um »natürliche Monopole«, d.h. es gibt keinen direkten Wettbewerb zwischen den Unternehmen, sondern werden sie durch die Bundesnetzagentur im Anreizregulierungsverfahren reguliert....

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

With the advent of digital convergence, incumbent telephone and cable companies have begun to offer their services, such as voice telephony, Internet and TV in so-called triple play packages. While carefully recognizing the technological, legal and economic framework of the fixed-line...

Cost cap tariffs are pay-per-use tariffs for which costs cannot exceed a predefined cost limit. They were recently introduced to telecommunications markets, but were previously also applied in the insurance industry as deductibles or in the rental industry as day rates. This paper develops and...

With the use of a laboratory experiment, we show the effects of co-investments on coverage, competition and price collusion in regulated network industries. On the one hand, co-investments turn out not to be a significant driver of new infrastructure investments beyond the level achieved by...