One of the key determinants of China's ability to continue its economic growth into the 21stcentury and to distribute the benefits of that growth to a broad spectrum of the population will be the further development of its railroad system. This paper examines the possibilities for improving the...

The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) is a classic example of regulation, and the origins and operation of this agency have been much analyzed. These have been variously described as examples of public interest regulation, capture regulation, and what I have called predatory regulation. By...

This publication (of 264 pages) represents the proceedings of a roundtable on regulation and competition issues arising in relation to railways. The roundtable was held at the OECD in October 1997. The proceedings includes 2 background papers examining issues in the regulation of railways and...

This paper studies the effects on local public transport of the reform begun in the late nineties, using data from a recent Bank of Italy survey. There are still substantial differences across Italy's regions, and the level of efficiency is far from the original aims of the reform. Although...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others’ trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product...

We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider’s incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide...

We examine how globalization affects firms incentives to train workers. In our model, firms invest in productivity-enhancing worker training before Cournot competition takes place. When two separated product markets become integrated and are thus replaced with a market with greater demand and...

In this paper, we conduct a pan-European effciency analysis to investigate the performance of European railways with a particular focus on economies of vertical integration. We test the hypothesis that integrated railways realize economies of scope and, thus, produce railway services with a...

We analyze the technical efficiency of German and Swiss urban public transport companies by means of SFA. In transport networks we might face different network structures or complexities, not observed, but influencing the production process. The unobserved factors are typically modeled as...