The role of regulation in financing transport infrastructures in Italy

The paper discusses the present regulatory framework in Italy concerning transport infrastructures financing and provides some policy indications. The Italian situation is characterised by non homogeneity among the transport modes and insufficient, or even perverse, incentives to efficiency. Also, the norms promote the tendency to overinvestment and “gold plating” because applied within a weak planning framework. After a theoretical introduction to the financing mechanisms (public funding, PPP, price cap, etc.), the paper is structured by modes. For each infrastructure type (national roads, highways, railways, ports and airports), the most common funding practices are commented, underlining their characteristics, limits and implications. National roads and railways are financed by general budget on the basis of a planning activity usually carried by the agent itself. Conversely, highways, airports and ports are partially financed by fares under conditions of legal monopoly granted by concessions. However, the formulas for fares determination are questionable and sometimes provide incentives to overinvestment. The last section will provide recommendations for a more efficient regulation.regulation; investment; infrastructure; airports; roads; highways; railroads; price cap; ports; concession

Una ipotesi di tariffazione discriminante per il finanziamento efficiente delle infrastrutture

La perdurante scarsità di risorse pubbliche costringe a rivedere l’assioma della necessità, per ragioni di efficienza allocativa, di tariffazione ai costi sociali marginali (SMCP). Il paper propone una radicale revisione di tale principio, argomentando in favore di strategie tariffarie discriminanti, più eque ed anche più efficienti se si tiene conto adeguatamente del costo-opportunità marginale dei fondi pubblici (COMPF). Infine la tecnologia oggi può consentire più facilmente forme di tariffazione articolate. Si presenta poi l’analisi di un caso fittizio ma verosimile, di una infrastruttura con traffico e costi di costruzione dati, e ipotesi di elasticità della domanda da letteratura, e si calcolano i benefici sociali netti di diverse tariffe discriminanti in presenza di un COMFP ancora ricavato dalla letteratura, e analogamente i benefici aggiuntivi da ridotta congestione. In estrema sintesi: “un monopolio perfettamente discriminante che non realizza extraprofitti è efficiente”

A proposal for a world database on transport infrastructure regulation

The paper presents the structure and the concepts at the basis of a database on world transport infrastructure regulation, to be launched. The database will be built promoting a “soft” survey on the world regulatory practices, to be filled by scholars and experts on a voluntary basis. The goal of the database is to stimulate research on best practices and interaction among regulators, regulated and scholars. The work is still under construction. The database structure is ready and the survey is already launched, but incomplete. This paper is a preliminary document which provides a detailed description of the aims and of the database structure, in order to circulate the project and collect suggestions from the academic community. The structure of the paper is as follows. After a presentation of the aims of the work, section 2 provides a literature review on existing databases. Section 3 details the project, describing the characteristics of the survey, the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, the network to be activated. Section 4 is giving more details on the actual structure of the database and of the corresponding survey. Section 5 gives notice of the first results obtained with a preliminary survey and a preliminary review of literature on some selected countries. Conclusions will outline the next steps of the research.transport; regulation; investment; infrastructure; database; survey

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the rst two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by o¤ering agents a contract from a xed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We nd that (heterogeneous) social preferences are signi cant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-of between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the rst two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by o¤ering agents a contract from a xed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We nd that (heterogeneous) social preferences are signi cant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-of between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences

An experiment on markets and contracts : do social preferences determine corporate culture?

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three treatments. In the last treatment, TR3, four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by offering the agents a contract from a fixed menu. In this menu, each contract is the optimal solution of a (complete information) mechanism design problem where principals face agents’ who have social (i.e. interdependent) distributional preferences a’ la Fehr and Schmidt [19] with a specific parametrization. Each agent selects one of the available contracts offered by the principals (i.e. he “chooses to work” for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. In the first two treatments, TR1 and TR2, we estimate individual social preference parameters and beliefs in the effort game, respectively. We find that social preferences are significant determinants of the matching process between labor supply and demand in the market stage, as well as principals’ and agents’ contract and effort decisions. In addition, we also see that social preferences explain the matching process in the labor market, as agents display a higher propensity to choose to work for a principal with similar distributional preferences.

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the first two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by offering agents a contract from a fixed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We find that (heterogeneous) social preferences are significant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-off between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences.social preferences; team incentives; mechanism design; experimental economics

The evolution of the disc variability along the hard state of the black hole transient GX 339-4

We report on the analysis of hard-state power spectral density function (PSD) of GX 339-4 down to the soft X-ray band, where the disc significantly contributes to the total emission. At any luminosity probed, the disc in the hard state is intrinsically more variable than in the soft state. However, the fast decrease of disc variability as a function of luminosity, combined with the increase of disc intensity, causes a net drop of fractional variability at high luminosities and low energies, which reminds the well-known behaviour of disc-dominated energy bands in the soft state. The peak-frequency of the high-frequency Lorentzian (likely corresponding to the high-frequency break seen in active galactic nuclei, AGN) scales with luminosity, but we do not find evidence for a linear scaling. In addition, we observe that this characteristic frequency is energy-dependent. We find that the normalization of the PSD at the peak of the high-frequency Lorentzian decreases with luminosity at all energies, though in the soft band this trend is steeper. Together with the frequency shift, this yields quasi-constant high frequency (5-20 Hz) fractional rms at high energies, with less than 10 percent scatter. This reinforces previous claims suggesting that the high frequency PSD solely scales with BH mass. On the other hand, this constancy breaks down in the soft band (where the scatter increases to ~30 percent). This is a consequence of the additional contribution from the disc component, and resembles the behaviour of optical variability in AGN.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Tracing the reverberation lag in the hard state of black hole X-ray binaries

We report results obtained from a systematic analysis of X-ray lags in a sample of black hole X-ray binaries, with the aim of assessing the presence of reverberation lags and studying their evolution during outburst. We used XMM-Newton and simultaneous RXTE observations to obtain broad-band energy coverage of both the disc and the hard X-ray Comptonization components. In most cases the detection of reverberation lags is hampered by low levels of variability signal-to-noise ratio (e.g. typically when the source is in a soft state) and/or short exposure times. The most detailed study was possible for GX 339-4 in the hard state, which allowed us to characterize the evolution of X-ray lags as a function of luminosity in a single source. Over all the sampled frequencies (~0.05-9 Hz) we observe the hard lags intrinsic to the power law component, already well-known from previous RXTE studies. The XMM-Newton soft X-ray response allows us to detail the disc variability. At low-frequencies (long time scales) the disc component always leads the power law component. On the other hand, a soft reverberation lag (ascribable to thermal reprocessing) is always detected at high-frequencies (short time scales). The intrinsic amplitude of the reverberation lag decreases as the source luminosity and the disc-fraction increase. This suggests that the distance between the X-ray source and the region of the optically-thick disc where reprocessing occurs, gradually decreases as GX 339-4 rises in luminosity through the hard state, possibly as a consequence of reduced disc truncation.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Ap