The Regulated Industries And The Economy

An authority on regulation who has served on the Council of Economic Advisers calls attention to the explosive growth in regulation since the late 1960s and its effects and examines movements for reform and deregulation

Expanding Competition in Regulated Industries reviews the changing regulatory environment, notably incentive regulation and competition in regulated industries. Some of the major changes in electricity, gas, and telephone utilities allow for competition in local service through unbundling. This book is of interest to researchers, utility managers, regulatory commissions, and the Federal Government.

Risk and Return for Regulated Industries provides a much-needed, comprehensive review of how cost of capital risk arises and can be measured, how the special risks regulated industries face affect fair return, and the challenges that regulated industries are likely to face in the future. Rather than following the trend of broad industry introductions or textbook style reviews of utility finance, it covers the topics of most interest to regulators, regulated companies, regulatory lawyers, and rate-of-return analysts in all countries. Accordingly, the book also includes case studies about various countries and discussions of the lessons international regulatory procedures can offer. Presents a unified treatment of the regulatory principles and practices used to assess the required return on capital Addresses current practices before exploring the ways methods play out in practice, including irregularities, shortcomings, and concerns for the future Focuses on developed economies instead of providing a comprehensive global reviews Foreword by Stewart C. Myers

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

Regulatory reform represents a major shift in the government's role toward price determination in the transportation and telecommunication industries. The resulting policy emphasizes dependence on market forces to set prices and to encourage efficient production techniques. While extensive research investigates the influence of deregulation on prices, profits and productivity, the effect on labor markets has not received the same scrutiny. Firms in these industries are of major importance to business operations in other industries because they provide the critical services of transporting goods and transmitting information. This may partly explain such extensive research on the product market aspects of regulatory reform. Examining labor markets in the transportation and telecommunications industries is also highly warranted, as historically these industries represented some of the most heavily unionized sectors in the economy. The extent to which regulatory reform has encouraged product market competition may not necessarily result in the same degree of competition across industries. Regulatory Reform and Labor Markets debates the notion that research on regulatory reform and labor markets should develop within the framework of the competitive model. This is achieved by presenting diverging views on wage and employment determination in distinctly different deregulated industries.

An assessment of regulation and its impact on the economy begins with the Act to Regulate Commerce of 1887 and traces the rise of regulation over one hundred years, closely examining its sharp curtailment in the 1980s

"Public Regulation" studies the formation of institutions and government policies that regulate industry, offering new data, new contexts, and new tools for analyzing the structure and performance of regulatory activity today. It addresses both how these institutions and policies came into being and how well or poorly they work. The contributors examine them variously, from economic, political, social, and historical points of view.The eleven original essays propose and demonstrate a wide variety of new techniques for assessing regulatory performance - general equilibrium theory, laboratory methods, the integration of rational expectations and game theory methods with regulations, cost-functions techniques, and probabilistic risk analysis - to reveal new empirical data from a range of regulated industries - agriculture, natural gas, nuclear power, airlines, health and environmental.Essays in the book's first part - "Design and Formation of Regulatory Regimes" - deal with the shaping of institutions and policies and with the political evolution of regulatory regimes.The second part of the book - "Assessment of Regulatory Performance" - covers theory and methods, performance and effects.Elizabeth E. Bailey is Dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. "Public Regulation" is fourteenth in the series Regulation of Economic Activity, edited by Richard Schmalensee.