This note illustrates the potential impact of the specification of a convex production technology on establishing minimal costs compared to the use of a non-convex technology when benchmarking electricity distributors. This methodological reflection is mainly motivated by recent engineering...

This paper presents an application of a mechanism that provides incentives to promote transmission network expansion in the area of the US electric system known as PJM. The applied mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to attract investment into transmission grids. It is...

Electricity transmission pricing and transmission grid expansion have received increasing regulatory and analytical attention in recent years. Since electricity transmission is a very special service with unusual characteristics, such as loop flows, the approaches have been largely tailor-made...

Incentive regulation in the form of price caps was adopted for interstate access service in 1991 as a way to provide local exchange carriers with an incentive to improve their productive efficiency. An issue that has arisen with the adoption of price cap regulation is whether a deterioration of...

This paper finds that coherent regulatory policies can boost investment in network industries of OECD economies. Rate-of-return regulation is generally thought to result in overinvestment, while incentive regulation is believed to entail underinvestment. Yet, previous empirical work has...

Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship...

This paper examines the Hogan-Rosellón-Vogelsang (2007) (HRV) incentive mechanism for transmission expansion, and tests it for different network topologies. This new mechanism is based upon redefining transmission output in terms of point-to-point transactions or financial transmission rights...

We compare various access pricing rules in the two-way access model. We show that the Generalized Efficient Component Pricing Rule (TECPR) leads to a lower equilibrium price than does the Efficient Component Pricing Rule, (ECPR) marginal cost pricing, (MCP) and any non-negative fixed access...