This paper examines the investment and financial decisions of a sample of 92 EU regulated utilities, taking into account key institutional features of EU public utilities, such as: a) regulation by agencies with various degrees of independence; b) partial ownership of the state in the regulated...

Congress recently has passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which leaves most elements of the current postal regulatory framework (postal monopoly, state owned enterprise) unaltered. Similar regulatory frameworks have been established in the U.S. and the European Community....

This paper first presents various simple regulatory mechanisms, in particular Vogelsang and Finsinger's iterative mechanism and Shleifer's yardstick Regulation. Unfortunately, in practical applications of these simple mechanisms the regulated utility will be able to dodge the regulator's...

This policy paper offers a synthesis of research on privatisation and its impacts on the utilities sector in different countries. It identifies issues to be considered by policy makers concerned with economic reform, including the implications of sequencing privatisation together with...

We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...