Contributions to External Events and Publications
Are regulation-driven distortions jeopardising energy markets?
A presentation to the Palanza Seminar, 4-6 October 2012, Sestri, Levante.
October 4, 2012
Documents
Documents
Assessing the economic significance of the professional legal services sector in the European Union
This report assesses the economic significance of the professional legal services sector in the European Union.1 Its purpose is to contribute to current understanding of the linkages between the sector and economic performance, and to help inform the assessment of policy proposals relating to the future regulation of legal services.
August 31, 2012
Documents
The UK’s carbon price floor policy
This year’s (2011) series of Beesley lectures was opened by Dieter Helm’s wide ranging examination of the UK government’s Electricity Market Reform (EMR) proposals and closed by Paul Dawson’s focused dissection of the carbon price support policy that has been developed alongside the EMR programme.
The opening lecture and the discussion that followed it illustrated the rather unusual state of affairs that exists in energy policymaking at the moment: there appears to be a consensus among leading economists familiar with the energy sector that the EMR proposals are badly flawed, and that they can be expected to fail.
January 1, 2012
Documents
Airport-airline relationships and contracts: a proposal
The last two decades have witnessed remarkable changes in European aviation, the consequence of a series of inter-related, largely symbiotic developments. These include: airline de-regulation; the use of information technology and the internet; new managerial approaches (product unbundling and differentiation) and the commercialisation of the airport industry. The developments were symbiotic not least because de-regulation encouraged competition and entrepreneurial activity, which in turn stimulated new technology and managerial innovation; substantial increases in productivity leading to a marked fall in the real cost of air travel across a hugely expanded network of services, has been the outcome.
January 1, 2012
Documents
Energy regulation: lessons from experience
The Chairman has asked us to consider two decades of regulation but, in dealing with energy regulation, I have to look much farther back into the past – some fifty years – to see the present situation in context. Regulation of the two energy utilities is bounded by much wider regulation of all the energy industries, the so-called “energy policies” that British governments have almost always had. Over the last few years, there has been a move from minimal energy policy constraints to a state in which those constraints are once again binding, indeed dominant.
January 1, 2012
Contributions to External Events and Publications
Innovation, competition and de-politicised regulation: the only way to bring down the cost of renewables?
Scotsman conference, The economics of renewables: will green energy leave Scotland in the red?
Edinburgh, 13 December 2011
December 13, 2011
Documents
Market definition and market power in the airport sector: competition from outside the relevant market
The purpose of this note is to draw attention to a generally neglected aspect of assessing market power in the supply of airport services. It develops a point made en passant in a paper written by the current author and George Yarrow for the UK CAA in 20101. The paper stressed that, although it was the standard practice in competition assessments to define substitution possibilities from within a defined market, sources of constraint on market power also arose from substitutable products defined to lie outside the relevant market and that it was the cumulative effect of all the substitution possibilities that determined the own-price elasticity of demand for a product or service.
December 9, 2011
New Series
On the discovery and assessment of economic evidence in competition law
Assessment of economic data/information/evidence in more or less any context can raise difficult issues. Compared with the testing of hypotheses and theories in the physical sciences, there is much less ability to make use of controlled, repeated/repeatable experiments; and the resulting limitations are often reinforced by the complexity of the relationships and interactions that are involved in the determination of economic outcomes. This complexity necessarily leads to high degrees of uncertainty, particularly (though by no means exclusively) uncertainty about the future.
December 1, 2011
Contributions to External Events and Publications
RIIO Economics Examining the economics underlying Ofgem’s new regulatory framework
Florence School of Regulation Working Papers
June 30, 2011
Contributions to External Events and Publications
Understanding the economic rationale for legal services regulation – A collection of essays
Last year we took the decision to take a step back from the existing regulatory structures and consider the underlying purpose of regulation of legal services, the legal services professions and the legal services market. We commissioned Chris Decker and George Yarrow from the Regulatory Policy Institute to write a report summarising what economics in particular can teach us. This report was never intended to be the last word on the subject, but we hoped that it might spur debate and lead to greater academic interest, both in and beyond law schools, in the topic of legal services regulation.
We are publishing this report, together with this collection of essays which provide responses from a variety of perspectives, at a fascinating time in the development of the regulation in legal services, both in England and Wales and indeed globally.
March 31, 2011