Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements...

Energiewende, Klimaschutz und Digitalisierung führen zu einem hohen Innovationsdruck für Unternehmen der Energie-, Wasser- und Entsorgungswirtschaft. Insbesondere der weitreichende Umbau der Energiewirtschaft erfordert neue Technologien, innovative Geschäftsmodelle und digitale Lösungen. Der...

Energiewende, Klimaschutz und Digitalisierung führen zu einem hohen Innovationsdruck für Unternehmen der Energie-, Wasser- und Entsorgungswirtschaft. Insbesondere der weitreichende Umbau der Energiewirtschaft erfordert neue Technologien, innovative Geschäftsmodelle und digitale Lösungen. Der...

Seit Anfang 2009 unterliegt die leitungsgebundene Energieversorgung in Deutschland der Anreizregulierung, durch die ein effizienter Betrieb von Strom und Gasnetzen sichergestellt werden soll. Unklar ist allerdings, inwieweit die Anreizregulierung sich auf Investitionen in Ersatz und Ausbau der...

In this paper we analyze the investment behavior of electricity distribution companies. First, we test the hypothesis if the implementation of an incentive-based regulatory scheme with revenue caps impacts the firms' investment decisions in general. Second, we test if the specific regulatory...

We analyze the effects of an incentive based regulatory scheme with revenue caps on the investment behaviors and decisions of 109 electricity distribution companies operating in Germany in 2006-2012. We hypothesize that Germany's implementation of incentive regulation in 2009 has a negative...

While the link between the ownership and productive efficiency of firms has been discussed extensively, no consensus exists regarding the superiority of one or the other in non-competitive, regulated environments. This paper applies a flexible production model to test for efficiency differences...

We empirically demonstrate a practical approach of efficiency evaluation with limited data availability in some regulated industries. We apply PCA-DEA for radial efficiency measurement to U.S. natural gas transmission companies in 2007. PCA-DEA reduces dimensions of the optimization problem...