Government regulators often establish maximum prices for regulated services. This paper explains the proper economic principles for establishing such constraints. The principles imply a range - an upper limit and a lower limit - that constrain the regulator's discretion. Principles emerging from...

Government regulators often establish maximum prices for regulated services. This paper explains the proper economic principles for establishing such constraints. The principles imply a range - an upper limit and a lower limit - that constrain the regulator's discretion. Principles emerging from...

This paper investigates various options for the organization of the railway industry when network operators require the access to multiple national networks to provide international (freight or passenger) transport services. The EU rail system provides a framework for our analysis....

In its first steps toward reform of its huge and hugely important railway system, the Russian Federation has begun corporate restructuring of a kind favored by many students of railway reform throughout the world: some kind of separation of the entity controlling the infrastructure from the...

The Polish government is considering methods of the privatizing and possible restructuring of the Polish National Railway, PKP, that would improve the efficiency of the railroad while creating some form of competition in order to prevent monopoly pricing. Traditional intramodal competition is...

Arenaways was the first private Italian company to enter the Italian rail passenger market on the route between Turin and Milan. Access to the network was delayed by the network operator (RFI), controlled by the same holding (FS) that controls the incumbent rail service company, Trenitalia. RFI...

Not all industries in post-socialist countries are appropriate targets for demonopolization and deregulation: as in the West, some "natural monopoly" sectors will require continued regulation to protect consumers from monopoly abuses. This paper focuses on three aspects of the design of...

Loan creation has not recovered after the crisis owing to a combination of demand and supply factors. Although the banking sector is sufficiently capitalised in the short term, banks are deleveraging by cutting down their dependence on cross-border financing. The ability of the financial sector...

We provide an empirical assessment of the German interurban bus industry two years after its deregulation in January 2013. In addition to a general description of key developments of the industry, we use a unique route-level price data set to study both competitive interaction in general and the...