This paper discusses the fundamental underpinnings and some implications of transaction cost regulation (TCR), a framework to analyze the interaction between governments and investors fundamentally, but not exclusively, in utility industries. TCR sees regulation as the governance structure of...

Since the 1980s, developing countries started adopting telecom reforms due to pressures from international institutions. However, Middle East and North African (MENA) countries lagged in adopting such reforms. Even after introducing telecom reforms in the MENA region beginning in 1995, not all...

Early economic research on natural monopoly regulation focused on market failure -- pricing tariffs and externalities. While Coase's multi-tariff marginal cost pricing became the standard, his approach to externality regulation as a contractual issue shifted the debate to transaction costs, but...

This article proposes a rule of contractual interpretation for regulatory contracts defined as contracts 1) used by a large number of market participants, 2) subject to limitations on deviation, and 3) designed with market problems (such as negative externalities) in addition to transactional...

This is a summarized and abridged version of some of the arguments made in the report “OpenTradeCloud: Regulating the Next Generation of the National Market System” [Summary Report], that is part of my doctorate research at Columbia Law School. It is still very rough and preliminary, and it...

One of the most heated debates in the current efforts to re-write the Communications Act has been whether the federal government should impose "Network Neutrality" requirements on broadband service providers. While we argue neither for nor against the need for Network Neutrality legislation in...

Over the past few months there have been calls to impose "wireless net neutrality" rules on the burgeoning United States wireless industry. These critics assert that certain practices by the wireless industry - such as handset "locking" practices, data bandwidth limitations, and control over...

In 1999, the FCC largely deregulated middle-mile or "special access" enterprise communications services, resulting in explosive growth of new competitors using new technologies, including cable, fiber-optics, and high-speed Ethernet loops. But in recent years the agency has expressed increased...

In this Policy Paper, we analyze the effects of quot;network neutralityquot; proposals that seek to mandate an inflexible set of rules that would foreclose or severely limit many market transactions. Our model reveals that under plausible conditions, rules that prohibit efficient commercial...

All humans and the institutions they create err from time to time. Regulatory agencies are no exception. This essay hypothesizes that by failing to recognize mutual fund abnormal returns as an open-access common pool subject to a race to first possession, the U.S. Securities and Exchange...