Competition policy, regulation and the institutional design of industry supervision

We study the welfare impact of enforcing a competitive behavior from an unregulated fringe competing with a regulated dominant operator with imperfectly differentiated goods. The fringe is potentially collusive but may be supervised by a competition authority. We show that the complementarity/substitutability between regulation and competition policy strongly depends on the nature of the market interaction. Forcing the fringe to adopt a competitive behavior always benefits consumers. However, it also affects the amount of subsidy that must be provided to the regulated firm for cost-reimbursement purposes, which has a social cost when public funds are costly. With complements, antitrust intervention is always welfare-improving. It is also preferable with weak substitutes but is detrimental to welfare for strong substitutes.Regulation, Competition policy

Information, competition and (In) complete discrimination

Nous considérons une firme qui génère un risque pour l'environnement via son activité industrielle et qui a une information privée à la fois sur son effort de précaution et sur le montant de ses actifs. Nous étudions l'interaction entre l'audit ex ante de l'effort de précaution par un régulateur et la vérification ex post de la capacité financière par un juge en cas d'accident. Du point de vue des incitations, les deux instruments sont utiles. Le policy-mix optimal dépend de la règle gouvernant l'intervention ex post et de l'efficience de l'intervention ex ante.

Eliciting the Regulation of an Economic System: The Case of the French Rail Industry

Based on the modern theory of regulation, the analysis aims to characterize the effective economic regulation of the French railway industry. The methodology consists in econometrically testing various scenarios of regulation and determining which of these best fits the data. Using aggregate data on the overall passenger traffic for the incumbent French rail operator (RO), SNCF, the two behavioral hypotheses of reference which we consider –absence of regulation of the rail operator which acts as a pure monopoly, and price regulation of services supplied by the RO– are both statistically significant and do not subtract from each other. This result is certainly related to the fact that passenger services include both high speed train services, for which the RO has some entrepreneurial freedom, and regional transport services, which are regulated by local authorities. In any case however, as the presence of unobservable efforts exerted by the RO to improve its productivity is statistically relevant, one concludes that the RO is not fully and properly regulated. This emphasizes that the design of policy reforms must account for the incentives they create on the RO. The analysis also shows that the most statistically significant scenarios are the ones in which the access tariff imposed by the infrastructure manager is such that the revenue generated by the access tariff is equal to the infrastructure spending. The pricing of the access to the infrastructure network therefore does not seem to be governed by economic principles, but more by budget considerations. While data limitations does neither allow to understand all the facets of a complex reality, nor to claim a high level of precision in the measure of all the parameters of interest, we believe however that we provide an objective methodology to characterize the optimal economic policies for the railway sector, in particular because it yields realistic estimates of the main structural parameters. Indeed the empirical results suggest that the railway industry as a whole exhibits increasing returns to scale, which incidentally is not compatible with the presence of multiple firms. In addition, the elasticity of demand for railway transport is relatively high, an indication of the competitive constraints this mode of transport faces from other transport modes or induced traffic.Regulation, Asymmetric information, Railroad industry

The régulation of transborder network services

Ce papier présente un cadre analytique simple permettant de comprendre les problèmes de coordination entre gestionnaires d'infrastructure nationaux en présence de service internationaux (i.e., qui doivent utiliser les différentes infrastructures) et les rôles pontentiels pour l'intervention d'une autorité supra-nationale à la fois au niveau des décisions d'investissement mais aussi aux niveaux des politiques de tarification de l'accès et de financement des infrastructures

Competition and Industry Structure for International Rail Transportation

This paper investigates various options for the organization of the railway industry when network operators require the access to multiple national networks to provide international (freight or passenger) transport services. The EU rail system provides a framework for our analysis. Returns-to-scale and the intensity of competition are key to understanding the impact of vertical integration or separation between infrastructure and operation services within each country in the presence of international transport services. We also consider an option in which a transnational infrastructure manager is in charge of offering a coordinated access to the national networks. In our model, it turns out to be an optimal industry structure.

The Regulator and the Judge: The Optimal Mix in TheControl of Environmental Risk

Nous considérons une firme qui génère un risque pour l'environnment via son activité industrielle et qui a une information privée à la fois sur son effort de précaution et sur le montant de ses actifs. Nous étudions l'interaction entre l'audit ex ante de l'effort de précaution par un régulateur et la vérification ex post de la capacité financière par un juge en cas d'accident. Du point de vue des incitations, les deux instruments sont utiles. Le policy-mix optimal dépend de la règle gouvernant l'intervention ex post et de l'efficience de l'intervention ex ante.

Anticompetitive vertical mergers waves

This paper develops an equilibrium model of vertical mergers. We show that competition on an upstream market between integrated firms only is less intense than in the presence of unintegrated upstream firms. Indeed, when an integrated firm supplies the upstream market, it becomes a soft downstream competitor to preserve its upstream profits. This benefits other integrated firms, which may therefore choose not to cut prices on the upstream market. This mechanism generates waves of vertical mergers in which every upstream firm integrates with a downstream firm, and the remaining unintegrated downstream firms obtain the input at a high upstream price. We show that these anticompetitive vertical mergers waves are more likely when downstream competition is fiercer.