Forthcoming in the Review of Industrial Organization, 2004. REGULATION AND MEASURING COST EFFICIENCY WITH PANEL DATA MODELS: APPLICATION TO ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION UTILITIES

Eff Regulation and Measuring Cost iciency with Panel Data Models: Application to Electricity Distribution Utilities

Persistent and transient productive inefficiency in a regulated industry: electricity distribution in New Zealand Persistent and transient productive inefficiency in a regulated industry: electricity distribution in New Zealand

The productive efficiency of a firm can be decomposed into two parts, one persistent and one transient. So far, most of the cost efficiency studies estimated frontier models that provide either the transient or the persistent part of productive efficiency. This distinction seems to be appealing also for regulators. During the last decades, public utilities such as water and electricity have wit...

Yardstick Regulation of Electricity Distribution Utilities Based on the Estimation of an Average Cost Function

In this paper we estimate an average-cost function for a panel of 45 Swiss electricity distribution utilities as a basis for yardstick regulation of the distribution-network access prices. Unlike the existing literature, we separate the electricity sales function of utilities from the network operation function. Several exogenous variables measuring the heterogeneity of the service areas were i...

Measuring the Level of Industrial Green Development and Exploring Its Influencing Factors: Empirical Evidence from China’s 30 Provinces

Nowadays, with the green economy becoming mainstream in the world, an industrial revolution as the core of green development has emerged. Based on the empirical evidence from China’s 30 provinces, this study establishes an evaluation index system of China’s industrial green development and applies the analytic hierarchy process to determine the indices’ weights and properties to measure the lev...

The Efficiency of CD40 Down Regulation by siRNA and Antisense ODN: Comparison of Lipofectamine and FuGENE6

Background: Dendritic cells (DCs) are ideal accessory cells in the field of gene therapy. Delivery of DNA and siRNA into mammalian cells is a useful technique in treating various diseases caused by single gene defects. Selective gene silencing by small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODN)s is an efficient method for the manipulation of cellular functions. An effic...