Energy efficiency provides a substantial opportunity to tackle increasing greenhouse gas emissions. However, in traditionally regulated energy markets, energy providers maximize their profits by selling electricity or heat as long as their marginal revenue exceeds their marginal costs of...

Regulator needs reliable information on which to base its policies when practicing regulation on individual firms. Various benchmarking methods can be used to evaluate the firm specific effectiveness on the industry. In this paper we study the sensitivity problems of the benchmarking processes...

Regulatory authorities in the European electricity sector use benchmarking techniques to determine the cost-efficient production level for an incentive regulation of distribution system operators (DSOs). With nearly 900 DSOs operating in the German electricity sector, of which 200 subject to...

China’s unbundling reform in 2002 aimed to introduce competitiveness into the power industry, especially the generation sector, to improve its operational efficiency. Meanwhile, great concern about a range of environmental problems and global climate change increasingly calls for saving energy...

In this paper, we analyze the technical efficiency of CO2 reduction potentials of German power and heat plants, using a non-parametric sequential Data Envelopment Analysis. We apply a metafrontier framework to evaluate plant-level efficiencies in the transformation of inputs into desirable...

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

This article provides a detailed analysis on the efficiency of the Colombian electricity generating sector during the period between the years of 2002 and 2005 using a stochastic frontier model. This model can be used to provide empirical evidence on the efficiency of the generating sector,...

In an effort to lower costs of provision, authorities have encouraged the consolidation of providers for a number of services such as electricity distributors, school boards, hospitals, and municipalities. In this paper we propose an endogenous merger process to evaluate the impact of...

In this study, we address a major problem in the measurement of firm performance and the regulation of natural monopolies, namely the intertemporal character of long-term investment decisions. In specific, we focus on the impact of adjustment costs of investments on estimates of firms’...