This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use...

Der deutschen Wasserwirtschaft könnte in naher Zukunft ein grundlegender Wandel ihrer Geschäftspraktiken bevorstehen. Durch die jüngeren Kartellverfahren gegen kommunale Wasserunternehmen in Hessen ist ein neues Kapitel im deutschen Wassersektor aufgeschlagen worden. In Verfahren gegen...

We extend the theory of monopoly regulation under imperfect information to the case of customer, rather than investor, ownership. The firm's manager can exert two types of effort - a contractible effort to reduce costs, and a non-contractible effort to increase quality. The former decreases...

When assigning a concession contract, the regulator faces the issue of setting the concession length. Another key issue is whether or not the concessionare should be allowed to set the timing of new investments. In this paper we investigate the impact of concession length and investment timing...

The research agenda of Europeanization is currently highly focused on issued related to what accounts for the 'horizontal' interaction between domestic actors and how these actors make use of stimuli originating from the EU. This paper aims to contribute to this line of inquiry through the case...

The German potable water supply industry is regarded as being highly fragmented, thus inhibiting high potentials for efficiency improvements through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the potential...

In most developed countries, the provision of water is organized at a local level. The costs and tariffs vary significantly, even between adjacent water utilities. Such heterogeneity is an obvious indication of the sectors overall inefficiency and stresses a need for institutional adjustments....

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

This paper reviews the book “Infrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa” by Antonio Estache and Quentin Wodon. The authors summarize the political debate on infrastructure policy in Africa in a very compelling and knowledgeable way and make a convincing case for pro-poor subsidies....

The German potable water supply industry is regarded highly fragmented, thus preventing efficiency improvements that could happen through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we use a cross-section sample of 364 German water utilities in 2006, applying Data...