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on Regulation |
| By: | Robert Botha; Roy Havemann |
| Abstract: | Explores how private sector participation in water service provision could improve efficiency, service delivery, and infrastructure maintenance in South Africa's water sector. |
| Keywords: | water, private sector, service delivery, infrastructure, South Africa |
| JEL: | L95 Q25 H44 |
| Date: | 2025–08–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cxs:wpaper:202504 |
| By: | Juan S. Mora-Sanguinetti; Juan A. Lafuente-Luengo; Belén Gill-de-Albornoz |
| Abstract: | This article aims to identify and quantify regulations designed to combat poverty, and to assess their effectiveness. Using textual analysis techniques, we systematically classify and quantify, for the first time, all measures adopted in Spain among the 175, 204 regulations issued by the Central Administration and the Autonomous Regions between 2007 and 2021. At both levels of government, we distinguish between targeted poverty-related regulations, such as those addressing energy poverty or child poverty, and broader poverty-related regulations, including those focused on precariousness, social assistance, or social exclusion. Furthermore, through multivariate regression analysis, we evaluate whether these regulatory frameworks have had a significant impact on regional risk-of-poverty rates. Our findings indicate that the effectiveness of both targeted and general regulatory measures depends on the level of government responsible for their implementation. Specifically, targeted measures are effective in reducing poverty risk when enacted at the regional level, but not when implemented by the central government. In contrast, broader regulatory measures prove to be effective tools for mitigating poverty when adopted at the national level, rather than by regional authorities. This study contributes to enhancing public sector accountability in Spain and provides valuable insights for refining future policymaking to achieve greater social impact. |
| Keywords: | Text Analysis, Regulation, Poverty, Energy Poverty, Child Poverty |
| JEL: | I38 J18 K36 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bfr:banfra:1041 |
| By: | Nicolay, Katharina; Spix, Julia; Steinbrenner, Daniela |
| Abstract: | We conduct a data-based policy evaluation of the first large-scale, EU-wide excess profit tax, implemented during the 2022 European energy crisis to tax the windfall profits of inframarginal electricity producers. In particular, we evaluate the inherent trade-off of excess profit taxation: the benefits from generating additional tax revenues for crisis mitigation versus the costs of potential distortions to production and investment decisions. On tax revenues, our analysis indicates that the inframarginal revenue cap could cover almost one quarter of the crisis-related government support, although the distribution of tax revenues and thereby the cost coverage is highly uneven across EU Member States. On distortions, we distinguish between impact on long-run investment and short-run production decisions. While we find only a limited negative impact on profitability, which could discourage investment in the long run, we find, using a difference-in-differences design, that electricity producers slightly adapt their short-run production decisions to improve their profitability. Our conclusions help to guide policymakers in future supply shocks. Excess profit taxes only provide a beneficial cost-benefit perspective under specific conditions. Policymakers must carefully time the implementation and accurately identify excess profits. Even with a generous definition of profits, excess profit taxes can be distortionary and, hence, fail to be pure windfall taxes. While retroactive implementation could be an avenue to enhance the cost-benefit profile of excess profit taxes as a crisis measure, it may undermine the credibility and predictability of the tax framework. |
| Keywords: | Excess profit taxes, windfall profit taxes, inframarginal revenue cap, European electricity crisis, non-distortionary taxation, real effects of taxation |
| JEL: | H21 H23 H32 H12 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:340104 |
| By: | Philipp Denter |
| Abstract: | Motivated by Germany's April 2026 fuel price regulation, in this note I study a two-period pricing problem with demand uncertainty and a rule that prohibits more than one price increase during the day. Under flexible pricing, the firm chooses the static monopoly price in each period. Under the regulation, by contrast, it may price strategically high in period 1 to preserve flexibility in period 2. I show that the regulation weakly raises expected average prices. The increase is strict when future high demand is sufficiently likely and the gap between high and low demand is large; otherwise, expected average prices are unchanged. Consumer surplus rises when expected prices do not, and decreases otherwise. |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2604.17576 |
| By: | Jolian McHardy (School of Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK) |
| Abstract: | Network oligopolies with sequential or multi-part consumption face double marginalisation across complementary components, motivating constraints on inter-firm pricing. Building on regulatory provisions permitting coordinated pricing for composite or multi-firm products, we study pricing rules that benchmark cross-firm prices against firms’ standalone or bundled prices. Coordination is not inherently welfare improving: discount-based benchmarks can generate equilibrium surcharges. By contrast, a no-discount rule, NDB, ties cross-firm pricing to own-firm bundles, internalising complementarities without propagating markups and raising welfare across a wide range of market sizes and demand parameterisations. However, private and social incentives need not align, so welfare-improving coordination need not arise endogenously. Whilst these results apply broadly to coordinated pricing in network industries, a calibration to the UK bus market illustrates quantitative relevance. NDB delivers substantial consumer-surplus gains (around 20%) and increases ridership, generating external benefits comparable in magnitude to current operating subsidies, up to £0.5 billion p.a. |
| Keywords: | network pricing; coordination regimes; complementary components; pricing benchmarks; competition policy; network industries. |
| JEL: | L13 L51 D43 D62 R48 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:shf:wpaper:2026003 |
| By: | Julian Keutz (Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne gGmbH) |
| Abstract: | Price premia between day-ahead and intraday electricity markets are well documented and often attributed to factors such as forecast errors or market frictions. However, existing explanations provide limited insight into why these price premia can exhibit a systematic diurnal structure, as observed in the German market. This paper provides a structural explanation by linking price premia to the bidding behavior of renewable producers. I develop a stylized two-stage model in which renewable producers determine their day-ahead bids under different bidding rationales, including expected-production bidding, risk-neutral bidding, and risk-averse bidding that accounts for tail risk. Closed-form solutions for day-ahead bids and the resulting price premia are derived and evaluated using a calibration to German market data. The results show how bidding behavior interacts with supply curve convexity and forecast uncertainty to translate risk preferences of renewable producers into systematic price premia. In particular, heterogeneous bidding behavior across renewable technologies replicates the diurnal pattern of price premia observed in the German market: negative premia around midday and positive premia during morning and evening hours arise when PV producers bid expected production while wind producers follow a risk-averse strategy. The findings suggest that observed price premia reflect both risk preferences and institutional features of renewable energy marketing, which may warrant reconsideration. |
| Keywords: | Sequential Markets;Renewable Energy Bidding; Price Premia; Risk Preferences |
| JEL: | Q41 Q42 L94 D81 |
| Date: | 2026–04–14 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:ewikln:022437 |
| By: | Bardey, David |
| Abstract: | This paper studies competition between television channels in a two-sided market with asymmetric firms. Motivated by a competition case in Colombia, we consider an oligopoly with three channels—two large and one small—that compete for viewers and advertisers. Advertising affects viewers both directly and indirectly through content quality, which is endogenously determined by the share of revenues that channels reinvest rather than distribute to shareholders. We first characterise the equilibrium of the subgame between viewers and advertisers and derive comparative statics linking audience levels to prices and payout policies. We then analyse the equilibrium of the game between channels, which jointly choose advertising prices and payout rates. While equilibrium prices are characterised implicitly, the model delivers closed-form solutions for payout decisions. Our main result is that asymmetries in audience size translate into asymmetric competitive pressure on the advertising side, which weakens the smaller channel. This effect is amplified when advertisers are restricted to single-homing, as in the presence of exclusivity clauses. By concentrating advertising demand on dominant channels, exclusivity reduces the smaller channel’s revenues and its incentives to invest in content quality, thereby limiting its ability to compete. These findings provide a novel mechanism through which exclusivity can generate exclusionary effects in two-sided media markets by affecting both demand allocation and endogenous investment decisions. We find that exclusivity reduces social welfare, mainly due to a decline in advertisers’ surplus that is not offset by improvements on the viewers’ side. |
| Keywords: | Two-sided markets; free-TV; ad-financed business model; competitive bottleneck; exclusivity contracts |
| JEL: | D43 L11 L13 L82 L86 M37 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:131679 |
| By: | Kevin Michael Frick |
| Abstract: | Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly used by firms to set prices. Previous research shows that they can exhibit collusive behaviour, but how quickly they can do so has so far remained an open question. I show that a modern deep reinforcement learning model deployed to price goods in a repeated oligopolistic competition game with continuous prices converges to a collusive outcome in an amount of time that matches empirical observations, under reasonable assumptions on the length of a time step. This model shows cooperative behaviour supported by reward-punishment schemes that discourage deviations. |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2604.15825 |
| By: | Paul S. Koh |
| Abstract: | This paper studies cost pass-through in differentiated-product oligopoly. I derive a general representation of the pass-through matrix that decomposes equilibrium price responses into the roles of demand curvature, substitution, and multiproduct ownership. This extends the classic insight in single-product monopoly to multiproduct settings in which diversion and ownership also matter. I then develop a tractable first-order approximation that yields a sufficient-statistics characterization for empirically relevant demand systems. Finally, I characterize the small-share limit and show how common demand specifications impose tail restrictions that shape pass-through. The results provide a practical framework for applied work on tax incidence, merger analysis, and related questions in imperfect competition. |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2604.21423 |
| By: | Rogna Marco (European Commission - JRC); Tillie Pascal (European Commission - JRC) |
| Abstract: | Adopted in June 2023, the European Union Regulation on Deforestation-free products (EUDR) aims at reducing global deforestation by creating a traceability system that should prevent products that have caused deforestation to be placed on, or exported from, the European market. The price increase of several commodities covered by the EUDR in the last few years has raised the concern that this could have been caused by the same regulation, due to increased production or compliance costs or market operator behaviour, even before the effective application of the EUDR. The present study tries to assess this hypothesis using descriptive statistics and data visualization. Several elements seem to indicate a distinctive pattern in the price increase of the commodities covered by the EUDR after 2023, but an imbalance between demand and supply for many of such commodities strongly undermines the argument of a causal effect of the regulation. Indeed, considering this imbalance, it appears that the observed price spikes for some EUDR-regulated commodities may have coincided with the entrance into force of the EUDR by chance, rather than being a direct consequence of the regulation. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:eapoaf:202601 |
| By: | David Martimort (Toulouse School of Economics, France); Aggey Simons (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Canada) |
| Abstract: | We characterize the optimal contract within the class of stationary mechanisms in a repeated buyer-seller relationship with persistent adverse selection and one-sided limited enforcement. A prepaid seller may breach after receiving the current transfer and terminate the relationship upon paying an enforceable penalty. In this stationary benchmark, the enforcement problem collapses to a bound on the transfer targeted to the most efficient type. This yields a three-regime characterization. With strong enforcement, the repeated static second-best contract is feasible. With weak (intermediate) enforcement, the top transfer is capped, inducing bunching among efficient types and additional downward distortions. With very weak enforcement, public penalties alone cannot sustain compliance, and the principal must leave strictly positive continuation rents, including for the least efficient type. We interpret the associated distortion as a virtual enforcement cost. |
| Keywords: | Adverse selection, Limited enforcement, Relational contracts, Contract breach. |
| JEL: | D82 D86 K12 C61 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ott:wpaper:2603e |
| By: | Andrea Gentilini |
| Abstract: | Financial supervisors are doing more with less. Over the past fifteen years, mandates have multiplied — covering prudential soundness, conduct, market integrity, operational resilience, and systemic risk — while supervised populations have grown and budgets have not kept pace. The resulting capacity gap is structural, not cyclical. This paper proposes data-driven supervision (DDS) as a scalable response. DDS converts regulatory reporting data into reproducible risk indicators, composite scores, and automated triage pathways, concentrating expert judgment where it adds most value. Because marginal costs per entity are low and infrastructure is reusable across supervisory missions, DDS generates economies of scale that traditional inspection-based approaches cannot. The paper develops formal frameworks for indicator design and triage, documents how regulatory reporting enables population-scale risk detection, and shows how a shared data infrastructure can serve multiple supervisory objectives simultaneously. Governance challenges — model risk, false positives, preservation of human judgment — are addressed directly, and a phased implementation roadmap for National Competent Authorities is presented. The analysis is candid about limits: DDS depends on data quality, complements rather than replaces traditional supervision, and requires active management of implementation risk. |
| Keywords: | data-driven supervision; supervisory burden; risk-based supervision; supervisory convergence; regulatory reporting; data governance, suptech; model risk governance |
| JEL: | C81 E58 G18 G28 G23 K23 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp26271 |
| By: | Helanya Fourie; Debra Shepherd |
| Abstract: | Analyses how improved internet access affects online behaviour. Results show increased use of the internet for education, job search, and information access following the rollout of fibre broadband. |
| Keywords: | internet access, broadband, digital behaviour, township, South Africa |
| JEL: | L96 J24 O18 |
| Date: | 2025–11–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cxs:wpaper:202509 |
| By: | Yaa Akosa Antwi; Marion Aouad; Nathan Blascak |
| Abstract: | We examine the financial consequences of the 2007 California Fair Pricing Law, which places a price ceiling on hospital bills for financially vulnerable individuals. Using cross-sectional variation in exposure to the law, proxied by county-level uninsured rates, we estimate its impact on individual financial outcomes. We find that the law reduces the likelihood of incurring non-medical debt in collections and the number of non-medical accounts in collections. In addition, we find evidence that credit scores increased and suggestive evidence that the number of delinquent accounts decreased for individuals in more exposed counties. Our results suggest hospital billing regulations can improve targeted individuals’ financial outcomes. |
| JEL: | G51 I1 I18 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35080 |