The authors place New Zealand's current institutional arrangements for its electricity sector within the context of successive waves of economic reform. They compare these arrangements with developments internationally, drawing together lessons for future policymaking both in New Zealand and...

Investigations into the causes and effects of parallel importing have concentrated on price discrimination, but arbitrage can also occur on non-price dimensions. Using a natural experiment in the New Zealand film distribution industry between May 1998 and November 2001, we examine the effect of...

In this paper we draw upon relevant theory of auctions to show that information exchange among firms that leads to an agreed schedule of prices may not be price fixing, and may enhance welfare. A case is described in which per se illegal communication among industry players that produced such...

This paper estimates the productivity and consumer and producer changes in the New Zealand telecommunications network market between 1987, when it was deregulated, and 1993 as the major firm, Telecom, evolved from a government department to a public company in an environment of light regulation....

Positive models of public-utility regulation should capture personal incentives of regulators. A regulatory objective function is specified by appeal to standard human concerns coupled with politics and processes peculiar to public-utility regulation. Constraints a rational regulator would...

We develop an interpretation of the economics of alternative shareholder liability regimes that challenges the view that limited liability always represents the most efficient form of corporate organization. Unlimited liability will prevail when creditors are willing to compensate shareholders...

The authors use data on 460 loans made to individual firms by the Bank of Nova Scotia, together with information on the location, capital size, and activity type of each of these firms, to test for the existence of discriminatory lending policies. Their analysis indicates that there were marked...

The new public management of the 1980s was based in part on a range of important new insights about the role of transaction and agency costs arising from contractual incompleteness in defining the boundaries of the firm and the governance relationships within it. In this paper, we consider the...

Climate change is one of the toughest challenges facing the world today. Putting a price on carbonemissions is an important step towards climate change mitigation. A cap and trade system is one ofthe ways to create a carbon price. The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZETS) is theworld’s...