A recurring issue in the regulation of public utilities is whether the firm should be permitted to recover the cost of particular assets through its allowed rates. The traditional standards have been the backward-looking prudency test and the forward-looking used-and-useful test. Under the...

This paper analyzes how economic deregulation impacts resource reconfiguration in the electric utility industry. We argue that to understand strategic change in this industry, we need to understand how development and deployment of a firm's resources reflects path dependencies that nonmarket...

Este trabajo analiza la necesidad de efectuar descuentos a las tarifas reguladas de servicios básicos, cuando la empresa provee al mismo tiempo servicios no regulados. La forma de realizar estos descuentos ha representado una fuente permanente de discrepancias entre la autoridad regulatoria y...

In the last two decades many major regulatory issues in Florida have been resolved by means of stipulated settlements between the utilities and interested parties, notably the Office of Public Counsel, instead of by the traditional method of hearings and litigation before the Public Services...

Relatively little is known about the practice of settlement rather than litigation in US utility regulation, or about the activities of consumer advocates. This paper presents evidence from Florida. During 1976-2002, over 30 per cent of earnings reviews were settled by stipulations involving the...

The world-wide electricity sector reforms have led to a search for alternative and innovative approaches to regulation to promote efficiency improvement in the natural monopoly electricity networks. A number of countries have used incentive regulation models based on efficiency benchmarking of...

The Federal Power Commission pioneered the use of negotiated settlements in the early 1960s as a means of coping with an increased workload and backlog. Legal scholars have emphasized the importance of settlements in coping with the regulatory load, and in saving time and money, albeit with some...

We compare the economic efficiency of a publicly-owned utility directly controlled by the government with a publicly-owned utility regulated by a public utility commission (PUC). Regulation by a PUC is modelled as a Nash equilibrium of a game between two principals, the government and the PUC,...

We compare the economic efficiency of a publicly-owned utility directly controlled by the government with a publicly-owned utility regulated by a public utility commission (PUC). Regulation by a PUC is modelled as a Nash equilibrium of a game between two principals, the government and the PUC,...

Negotiated settlements have become a frequently used alternative to contested proceedings when setting prices charged by public utilities under the US rate-of-return regulatory model. The behavior of the representatives of consumer advocates and the firms during settlement negotiations determine...