This paper reviews the empirical evidence on electricity reform in developing countries. We find that country institutions and sector governance play an important role in success and failure of reform; reforms appear to have increased operating efficiency and expanded access to urban customers;...

In December 1990, the twelve regional electricity companies responsible for the distribution and supply of electricity in England and Wales were privatised. For the first few years following privatisation, real prices, profits and costs in the industry rose. Following two price control reviews,...

Chile was the first country in the world to implement a comprehensive reform of its electricity sector in the recent period. Among developing countries only Argentina has had a comparably comprehensive and successful reform. This paper traces the history of the Chilean reform, which began in...

In theory the potential for credit risk diversification for banks could be substantial. Portfolio diversification is driven broadly by two characteristics: the degree to which systematic risk factors are correlated with each other and the degree of dependence individual firms have to the...

We provide a new framework for identifying timing. Our analysis focuses on the smoothed joint history of the fund with the benchmark. The approach is fully non-parametric. Therefore, it has the advantage of avoiding the misspecification problems so common in this literature. The test statistic...

This article reports the results of fitting unobserved components (structural) time series models to data on real income per capita in eight regions of the United States. The aim is to establish stylised facts about cycles and convergence. A new model is developed in which convergence components...

Ohio allows communities to vote to aggregate the loads of individual consumers (unless they opt out) in order to seek a competitive energy supplier. Over 200 communities have voted to do this for electricity. By 2004 residential switching reached 69% in Cleveland territory (95% from municipal...

When computing regulated prices, the standard method is the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) which involves the estimation of a single parameter: the beta of the company. Yet, these computational methods fail to take into account any preference the regulator might have to increase or decrease...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries but is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis. In this paper we present an efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks using a sample of about 500 electricity distribution...

This paper supplements analyses of Argentine transmission expansions at the federal level by looking at experience in Buenos Aires province. A Regional Electricity Forum of distribution companies has drawn up and begun to implement a ten-year transmission expansion plan. Contrary to previous...