In the last days of the electoral campaign for the 2004 general election in Spain, on Thursday March 11th 2004, a series of simultaneous terror attacks caused the death of 191 persons in commuting trains in the capital Madrid. Four days later, the opposition party won the election, against all...

An extensive literature mostly developed after the Barcelona Olympic Games has questioned the existence of net economic benefits arising from the organization (with significant amounts of public resources) of major sporting events such as the Olympics, although some studies still defend their...

Measuring productive efficiency provides information on the likely effects of regulatory reform. We present a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of a sample of 38 vehicle inspection units under a concession regime between the years 2000 and 2004. The differences in efficiency scores show the...

Spanish Abstract: Durante los años 2006 y 2007, con la creación del Decreto Ley 3/2006, el Decreto Real 1634/2006 y la Orden ITC/400/2007, se introdujeron muchos cambios en el mercado eléctrico español. Uno de los objetivos de las medidas mencionadas era disminuir el poder de mercado en la...

Regulatory independence has been proposed as a mechanism to alleviate the commitment problem associated to the sunk nature of investments in network industries, including telecommunications. This paper summarizes the authors’ and others’ work in this field (in a pause to take stock of...

We present case studies of the evolution of regulatory independence in practice for 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries in the telecommunications industry. Based on these studies, we construct two realistic indices of regulatory independence, which improve upon the measures of independence...

In this paper, we apply several alternative methods previously used in the literature to measure the degree of regulatory independence fortelecommunications regulators. These alternative methods are applied to a new homogeneous data set for 23 Latin American countries overa 15-year period. We...