Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost...

While the link between the ownership and productive efficiency of firms has been discussed extensively, no consensus exists regarding the superiority of one or the other in non-competitive, regulated environments. This paper applies a flexible production model to test for efficiency differences...

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive- based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs....

We analyze the effects of an incentive based regulatory scheme with revenue caps on the investment behaviors and decisions of 109 electricity distribution companies operating in Germany in 2006-2012. We hypothesize that Germany's implementation of incentive regulation in 2009 has a negative...

This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited...

Revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies. One example is the European energy sector, where benchmarking methods are based on actual cost data, which are influenced by managerial inefficiency...

This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service...

In the 2011 post-Arab Spring migration wave, over 64,000 migrants landed on the southern Italian coast, with many of them potentially working illegally on farms through caporalato, a widespread system of illegal recruitment of underpaid farm labor run by Italian agrimafias. To test this...

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....