The present article discusses economic issues related to the design of optimal regulatory contracts on the example of the urban public transport industry. It highlights the importance of the design of efficient regulatory contracts in the context of changes facing the urban transportation...

We study the impact of different regulatory designs on the cost efficiency of operators providing a public service, exploiting data from the French transport industry. The distinctive feature of the study is that it considers regulatory regimes as endogenously determined choices, explained by...

The regulation of infrastructure by the ACCC and other economic regulators in Australia is based around net present value estimation techniques. Recently, Monkhouse (2007), suggested that real options valuation would provide better incentives for investment in infrastructure, but did not...

The provision of third-party access to rail infrastructure in WA's Pilbara region has been a contentious issue over the past decade. The most recent endeavour proposed by the State Government involves a haulage regime, whereby incumbents would be required to haul the wagons of third parties...

Until recently, Australia's State Government-owned railways operated almost entirely within their home states. This has begun to change, in response to the new dynamics unleashed by economic and structural reforms which began in the 1990s. The economic regulatory system that governs third party...

This paper presents a quantitative and analytical documentation to the debate on taxi service liberalization. The results of a survey of the Bank of Italy on the main Italian cities show that the supply of taxi is much lower than that of other foreign cities. The paper gives also some...

This paper studies access pricing under three regimes: regulated access (VSR), negotiated access with discriminatory pricing (VSD) and negotiated access with non-discriminatory pricing (VSN). We compare each regime along three metrics: network quality, consumer surplus, and social welfare. To do...

The U.S. federal government enacted fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks for the first time in September 2011. Rationales for using this policy tool typically depend upon frictions existing in the marketplace or consumers being myopic, such that vehicle purchasers undervalue the...

This paper studies the effect of termination rates on substitution between fixed and mobile calls and access, in a model where heterogeneous consumers can subscribe to one or both types of offers. Simulations show that each (fixed or mobile) termination rate has a positive effect on the take-up...

This paper analyses the impact of substitution between fixed and mobile telephony on call prices. We develop a model where consumers differ in the benefits of mobility and firms price discriminate between on-net and off-net calls. We find that call prices are distorted downwards due to...