Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover...

Economic theory states that “free market” competition naturally achieves lower prices—thereby increasing efficiency and benefiting society. This is the first paper in the literature to use means testing to statistically analyze electricity prices, from 1970-2011, for states that...