This paper aims to examine the difference between US and European manufacturing before and during the World War II, focusing on the key technology in the metal-working sector: machine tools. We present a new data set covering the installed capacity of metal-working tools in the United States and...

I study the advantages of pollution permit markets over traditional standard regulations when the regulator has incomplete information on firms’ emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in large cities). Because the regulator only observes each firm’s abatement...

This paper applies the concept of regulatory threat to analyse the electricity supply industry in Germany, where in contrast to other European member states, there is no ex-ante regulation of network access charges. Instead, network access relies on industrial self-regulation and ex-post control...

State-owned electricity companies typically set prices that are too low to finance new investment when needed, and which create additional problems where private investment is sought. The paper asks to what extent this can be attributed to historic cost accounting, and finds that provided the...

In the UK, domestic customers must be able to terminate energy contracts at 28 days’ notice. This has been seen as a transitional protection for customers and for competition. This paper reviews the arguments for and against the 28 day rule, and examines the extent to which UK suppliers have...

This paper attempts to verify whether we are moving towards a new paradigm of the network energy industry (electricity and natural gas), based on a wide decentralisation of the energy supply. We do this by comparing the social benefits of decentralised and centralised models, simulating...

Argentina’s 1992 transmission expansion policy was subsequently modified by, for example, including provision for transmission companies and proposing quality and substation expansions. There have been several such expansions, and no lack of investment in quality and reliability of supply. In...

Demsetz (1968) advocated competitive bidding as a replacement for natural monopoly regulation. Williamson (1976) and Goldberg (1976) argued that these problems of natural monopoly regulation are inherent in long-term investment under uncertainty, and that both long- and short-term franchising...

In recent years, a number of empirical studies and energy regulators have applied benchmarking techniques to measure the efficiency and performance of network utilities. An important issue has been the extent to which such results are influenced by contextual factors. Among these, weather...

From 1992 to 2002, major expansions of the Argentine electricity transmission sector depended on users proposing, voting and paying for such expansions, which were then put out to competitive tender. Commentators hold this novel policy to have been unsuccessful, mainly on the ground that it...