The Public Management of Risk: Separating Ex Ante and Ex Post Monitors

When a firm undertakes risky activities, the conflict between social and private incentives to implement safety care requires public intervention which can take the form of both monetary incentives but also ex ante or ex post monitoring, i.e., before or after an accident occurs. We delineate the optimal scope of monitoring depending on whether public monitors are benevolent or corruptible. We show that separating the ex ante and the ex post monitors increases the likelihood of ex post investigation, helps prevent capture and improves welfare.Risk Regulation, Monitoring, Capture, Integration, Separation

The role of abatement technologies for allocating free allowances

The issue of how to allocate pollution permits is critical for the political sustainability of any cap-and-trade system. Under the objective of offsetting firms' losses resulting from the environmental regulation, we argue that the criteria for allocating free allowances must account for the type of abatement technology: industries that use process integrated technologies should receive some free allowances, whereas those using end-of-pipe abatement should not. In the long run, we analyze the interaction between the environmental policy and the evolution of the market structure. In particular, a reserve of pollution permits for new entrants may be justified when the industry uses a process integrated abatement technology. --Cap-and-trade system,profit-neutral allocations,abatement technologies

Collusion Under Asymmetric Information and Institutional Incompleteness

We study collusion between a regulated firm and an unregulated competitor selling differentiated goods in a common market. There exists an institutional incompleteness that prevents the regulator from contracting with the competitor. Due to this, the effectiveness of yardstick mechanisms can be impaired by some behavior of the unregulated firm intended at concealing information from the regulator. With collusion under asymmetric information (modeled as in Laffont and Martimort), we show that the unique regulator is not able to benefit from asymmetries of information within the coalition if she offers contracts that induce truthful revelation of her firm's cost. Collusion entails large departures from the full information allocation (bunching may appear) casting some doubt on the optimality of collusion-proof mechanisms. When firms are regulated each by a different body, the lack of coordination between regulators to fight collusion still entails costs.

The role of abatement technologies for allocating free allowances

The issue of how to allocate pollution permits is critical for the political sustainability of any cap-and-trade system. Under the objective of offsetting firms' losses resulting from the environmental regulation, we argue that the criteria for allocating free allowances must account for the type of abatement technology: industries that use process integrated technologies should receive some free allowances, whereas those using end-of-pipe abatement should not. In the long run, we analyze the interaction between the environmental policy and the evolution of the market structure. In particular, a reserve of pollution permits for new entrants may be justified when the industry uses a process integrated abatement technology

Why Is Exclusivity in Broadcasting Rights Prevalent and Why Does Simple Regulation Fail? *

Pay-TV firms compete both downstream to attract viewers and upstream to acquire broadcasting rights. Because profits inherited from downstream competition satisfy a convexity property, allocating rights to the dominant firm maximizes the industry profit. Such an exclusive allocation of rights emerges as a robust equilibrium outcome but may fail to be welfare maximizing. We analyze whether a ban on resale and a ban on package bidding may improve welfare. These corrective policies have no impact on the final allocation but lead to profit redistribution along the value chain

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

Why Is Exclusivity in Broadcasting Rights Prevalent and Why Does Simple Regulation Fail? *

Pay-TV firms compete both downstream to attract viewers and upstream to acquire broadcasting rights. Because profits inherited from downstream competition satisfy a convexity property, allocating rights to the dominant firm maximizes the industry profit. Such an exclusive allocation of rights emerges as a robust equilibrium outcome but may fail to be welfare maximizing. We analyze whether a ban on resale and a ban on package bidding may improve welfare. These corrective policies have no impact on the final allocation but lead to profit redistribution along the value chain