Have consumers benefited from the reforms in the electricity distribution sector in Latin America?

The authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms'productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and operation and maintenance (O&M) input requirement functions using alternative econometric approaches. Their main conclusions are: 1) Private firms perform better (approximately 30 percent) than public firms. 2) The regulatory regimes matter, so that price-cap regulated firms do better than rate-of-return regulated firms, and firms regulated under hybrid regimes have intermediate performance. 3) Private firms operating under rate of return are at most as efficient as public firms. 4) There is no clear pattern of differences in electricity prices according to the regulatory regime. 5) Final prices fell in general but the drop did not match the productivity gains, implying that the operators and the state share some of the gains in the form of rents and higher tax revenue, respectively.Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Markets and Market Access,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Business in Development,Business Environment

Comparing the performance of public and private water companies in the Asia and Pacific region : what a stochastic costs frontier shows

Estache and Rossi estimate a stochastic costs frontier for a sample of Asian and Pacific water companies, comparing the performance of public and privatized companies based on detailed firm-specific information published by the Asian Development Bank in 1997. They find private operators of water companies to be more efficient than public operators. Costs in concessioned companies tend to be significantly lower than those in public companies. The authors show that rankings based on standard indicators are not always very consistent. This paper contributes to that growing literature. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical structure of the cost model estimated. Section 3 provides an overview of earlier studies of the water sector. Section 4 presents the estimates of costs frontiers obtained for a large sample of Asian and Pacific Region water companies, distinguishing between public and private operators. Section 5 compares the performance ranking from efficiency frontier measures to those obtained from productivity indicators. Section 6 concludes.Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Town Water Supply and Sanitation

Regulatory agencies : impact on firm performance and social welfare

The authors explore the relation between the establishment of a regulatory agency and the performance of the electricity sector. The authors exploit a unique dataset comprising firm-level information on a representative sample of 220 electric utilities from 51 development and transition countries for the years 1985 to 2005. Their results indicate that regulatory agencies are associated with more efficient firms and with higher social welfare.Infrastructure Regulation,Privatization,Energy Production and Transportation,Emerging Markets,Regulatory Regimes

Conscription and Crime

The initiation in criminal activities is, typically, a young phenomenon. The study of the determinants of entry into criminal activities should pay attention to major events affecting youth. In many countries, one of these important events is mandatory participation in military service. The objective of this study is to estimate the causal relationship between mandatory participation in military service and crime. The authors exploit the random assignment through a draft lottery of young men to conscription in Argentina to identify this causal effect. Their results suggest that participation in military service increased the likelihood of developing a criminal record in adulthood (in particular, for property and weapon-related crimes).Peace&Peacekeeping,Children and Youth,Political Systems and Analysis,Politics and Government,Crime and Society

Existence, uniqueness and decay rates for evolution equations on trees

We study evolution equations governed by an averaging operator on a directed tree, showing existence and uniqueness of solutions. In addition we find conditions of the initial condition that allows us to find the asymptotic decay rate of the solutions as $t\to \infty$. It turns out that this decay rate is not uniform, it strongly depends on how the initial condition goes to zero as one goes down in the tree.Fil: del Pezzo, Leandro Martin. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Mosquera, Carolina Alejandra. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Julio Daniel. Universidad de Alicante; España. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Computing (R, S) policies with correlated demand

This paper considers the single-item single-stocking non-stationary stochastic lot-sizing problem under correlated demand. By operating under a nonstationary (R, S) policy, in which R denote the reorder period and S the associated order-up-to-level, we introduce a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model which can be easily implemented by using off-theshelf optimisation software. Our modelling strategy can tackle a wide range of time-seriesbased demand processes, such as autoregressive (AR), moving average(MA), autoregressive moving average(ARMA), and autoregressive with autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity process(AR-ARCH). In an extensive computational study, we compare the performance of our model against the optimal policy obtained via stochastic dynamic programming. Our results demonstrate that the optimality gap of our approach averages 2.28% and that computational performance is good

The unique continuation property for a nonlinear equation on trees

In this paper, we study the game p-Laplacian on a tree, that is, u(x) = α / 2 max y∈S(x) u(y) + min y∈S(x) u(y) + β m y∈S(x) u(y);here x is a vertex of the tree and S(x) is the set of successors of x. We study the family of the subsets of the tree that enjoy the unique continuation property, that is, subsets U such that u |U = 0 implies u ≡ 0.Fil: del Pezzo, Leandro Martin. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Mosquera, Carolina Alejandra. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Julio Daniel. Universidad de Alicante; España. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The case for international coordination of electricity regulation : evidence from the measurement of efficiency in South America

A decade long experience shows that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies in South America is proving to be the hard part of the reform process. The operators who control most of the information needed for regulatory purposes have little interest in volunteering their dissemination unless they have an incentive to do so. The authors argue that, in spite of, and maybe because of, a much weaker information base and governance structure, South America's electricity sector could pursue an approach that relies on performance rankings based on comparative efficiency measures. The authors show that with the rather modest data currently available publicly, such an approach could yield useful results. They provide estimates of efficiency levels in South America's main distribution companies between 1994 and 2000. Moreover, the authors show how relatively simple tests can be used by regulators to check the robustness of their results and strengthen their position at regulatory hearings.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Enterprise Development&Reform,Labor Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Geographical Information Systems,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Educational Technology and Distance Education