Micro and Small Businesses’ Satisfaction with the UK Energy Market: Policy Implications

While householders’ ability to navigate the domestic retail energy market has generated considerable debate, little attention has been given to micro and small businesses’ (MSBs) purchasing of energy. This paper provides the first academic assessment of MSBs’ satisfaction with the UK’s retail energy market. Using survey data from the UK energy regulator we find that while intermediaries are central to MSBs switching energy supplier, the quantity of marketing contact received from them is a key source of dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction with marketing contact has direct policy relevance as the Competition and Market Authority’s 2016 Energy Market Investigation recommended that a database of ‘disengaged’ MSBs be established to enable marketing communications from rival suppliers to prompt MSBs to switch. We also query whether the need for more MSB engagement is obvious, given the prevalence of multi-year energy contracts among MSBs, suggesting that the ‘optimal’ switching level of MSBs likely differs from that of householders. Our evidence suggests that there could be benefits from increased regulatory oversight of intermediaries’ behaviour. Furthermore we note that existing data fail to address an issue of importance for regulatory decision making: the overlap between households and MSBs and the potential choice for MSBs between domestic and non-domestic contracts. Overall, the paper exemplifies the types of insights that can be obtained by regulators providing wider access to the surveys they commission. We recommend that UK regulatory agencies share anonymised raw survey data by default to enhance the transparency, and potentially quality, of their decision making

Local Public Services in Wisconsin: Alternatives for Municipalities with a Focus on Privatization

Both rural and urban municipal officials, faced with increased local resistance to higher taxes, increasing expenditure needs, weakening financial support from higher levels of government, and the growing pressure to "do more with less" have accelerated their search for alternative ways of delivering local public services. The downsizing of government has been brought to the forefront of public discussion in part due to the general conservative shift at the federal and state level and the need to maintain a balanced budget at the local level. Related private sector trends downsizing middle management as a means to become "leaner and meaner," reducing duplication and waste, and increasing earnings, profit levels, and returns to investors. At the same time many local public officials are faced with rising costs to maintain an aging infrastructure, accommodating the needs of special populations, satisfying rules and regulations imposed by higher levels of government, funding new investments to meet the demands of a growing economy in some instances, or maintaining critical services in the face declining economies. In short, the rules of the game for effective management of local governments have changed.

Price and Behavioural Signals to Encourage Household Water Conservation: Implications for the UK

Water scarcity is a global concern. Even in non-drought situations the political and economic costs of developing water resources may favour conservation. Using a single high price to constrain demand raises distributional and political challenges. Increasing block tariffs (IBTs) have been proposed as a solution, balancing incentives for conservation with an equitable distribution of costs across households. Our survey indicates the international evidence on using IBTs to conserve water is mixed, highlighting the operational challenges of implementing effective IBTs. An alternative approach that may side-step affordability concerns are non-price conservation interventions. Robust evidence on behavioural interventions to conserve water is limited, although social comparisons appear effective. Nevertheless, existing price and behavioural interventions have typically been implemented in response to droughts, thus caution is needed when generalising this evidence to non-drought situations. We discuss the applicability of IBTs to the UK, highlighting an essential pre-condition is detailed research to understand a locality’s water consumers and their water demand

A Postcode Lottery: Regional Electricity Price Variations for Inactive Consumers

The introduction of a price cap for consumers who have not switched to cheaper deals in the British energy market reflects increasing political concern about the higher prices paid by these consumers compared with their more active counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate the variations in prices paid by inactive consumers for electricity in different parts of Britain over the last 45 years. The regions identified as the cheapest and most expensive vary noticeably over the period, while the magnitude of the regional differences are, if anything, lower since the introduction of competition than they were before privatisation. We explore the characteristics of consumers who stated that they had never switched supplier, and who were therefore subject to these regional price differences, using unique data from a consumer survey in 2011. Responses to the question ‘have you ever switched supplier’ identified several characteristics of inactive consumers which were consistent with the findings of previous studies: not being retired, having lower electricity expenditure, not having a gas supply and using certain payment methods are associated with a consumer reporting never having switched. However applying a consistency test (namely observing whether consumers reported being with their region’s incumbent supplier) highlighted a number of issues with relying solely on survey data to identify long-term inactivity

Energy affordability in the EU: The risks of metric driven policies

This paper provides a pan-EU mapping of energy affordability using energy expenditure shares. Large variations in energy expenditure shares are identified, with the shares being significantly higher in New Member States than the EU15. First, these variations indicate that a single expenditure-based pan-EU fuel poverty metric is problematic; there is a trade-off between a metric identifying households in most need within individual Member States and one identifying households in a similar position across Member States. Second, household-level data from the UK, France and the Republic of Ireland are used to simulate the impact of ‘policy interventions’, involving energy expenditure reductions or income increases, on the recorded rate of fuel poverty. These simulations highlight that emphasising high-level fuel poverty metrics may distort policymakers’ choices towards improving the ‘picture’ of fuel poverty rather than maximising welfare improvements. Robust impact assessments identifying the fuel poverty interventions which deliver the greatest welfare increases for a given cost offer a better means of policy evaluation

Very long baseline astrometry of PSR J1012+5307 and its implications on alternative theories of gravity

PSR J1012+5307, a millisecond pulsar in orbit with a helium white dwarf (WD), has been timed with high precision for about 25 years. One of the main objectives of this long-term timing is to use the large asymmetry in gravitational binding energy between the neutron star and the WD to test gravitational theories. Such tests, however, will be eventually limited by the accuracy of the distance to the pulsar. Here, we present VLBI (very long baseline interferometry) astrometry results spanning approximately 2.5 years for PSR J1012+5307, obtained with the Very Long Baseline Array as part of the MSPSRPI project. These provide the first proper motion and absolute position for PSR J1012+5307 measured in a quasi-inertial reference frame. From the VLBI results, we measure a distance of $0.83^{+0.06}_{-0.02}$kpc (all the estimates presented in the abstract are at 68% confidence) for PSR J1012+5307, which is the most precise obtained to date. Using the new distance, we improve the uncertainty of measurements of the unmodeled contributions to orbital period decay, which, combined with three other pulsars, places new constraints on the coupling constant for dipole gravitational radiation $\kappa_D=(-1.7\pm1.7)\times 10^{-4}$ and the fractional time derivative of Newton's gravitational constant $\dot{G}/G = -1.8^{\,+5.6}_{\,-4.7}\times 10^{-13}\,{\rm yr^{-1}}$ in the local universe. As the uncertainties of the observed decays of orbital period for the four leading pulsar-WD systems become negligible in $\approx10$ years, the uncertainties for $\dot{G}/G$ and $\kappa_D$ will be improved to $\leq1.5\times10^{-13}\,{\rm yr^{-1}}$ and $\leq1.0\times10^{-4}$, respectively, predominantly limited by the distance uncertainties.Comment: published in ApJ (2020ApJ...896...85D

Reconciling optical and radio observations of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J1640+2224

Previous optical and radio observations of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J1640+2224 have come to inconsistent conclusions about the identity of its companion, with some observations suggesting the companion is a low-mass helium-core (He-core) white dwarf (WD), while others indicate it is most likely a high-mass carbon-oxygen (CO) WD. Binary evolution models predict PSR J1640+2224 most likely formed in a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) based on the pulsar's short spin period and long-period, low-eccentricity orbit, in which case its companion should be a He-core WD with mass about $0.35 - 0.39 \, M_\odot$, depending on metallicity. If it is instead a CO WD, that would suggest the system has an unusual formation history. In this paper we present the first astrometric parallax measurement for this system from observations made with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), from which we determine the distance to be $1520^{+170}_{-150}\,\mathrm{pc}$. We use this distance and a reanalysis of archival optical observations originally taken in 1995 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in order to measure the WD's mass. We also incorporate improvements in calibration, extinction model, and WD cooling models. We find that the existing observations are not sufficient to tightly constrain the companion mass, but we conclude the WD mass is $>0.4\,M_\odot$ with $>90\%$ confidence. The limiting factor in our analysis is the low signal-to-noise ratio of the original HST observations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure