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DIW Discussion Papers 1641 / 2017
While the link between the ownership and productive efficiency of firms has been discussed extensively, no consensus exists regarding the superiority of one or the other in non-competitive, regulated environments. This paper applies a flexibleproduction model to test for efficiency differences associated with ownership types while allowing the production to adapt to market restructuring over time. ...
2017| Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand, Julia Rechlitz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1614 / 2016
We analyze the pass-through of cost changes to retail tariffs in the German electricity market over the 2007 to 2014 period. We find an average pass-through rate of around 60%, which significantly varies with demand factors: while the pass-through rate to baseline tariffs, where firms have higher market power, is only 50%, it increases to 70% in the competitive segment of the market. Although the pass-through ...
2016| Tomaso Duso, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1585 / 2016
Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004; Greene, 2005), and the StoNEZD approach (Johnson and Kuosmanen, 2011) by means of Monte Carlo simulation ...
2016| Maria Nieswand, Stefan Seifert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1576 / 2016
Potable water supply in Germany is highly fragmented. A consolidation of the industry could, therefore, lead to lower cost of water supply and price savings for the customers. In this paper we estimate a total cost function for potable water supply based on a unique sample of German water utilities observed between 2004 and 2010. Newly available data allows for a detailed cost modeling approach. Capital ...
2016| Michael Zschille
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DIW Discussion Papers 1571 / 2016
Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model. This paper derives estimators of scale efficiency and scale elasticity for semi-parametric stochastic non-smooth ...
2016| Stefan Seifert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1555 / 2016
Revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies. One example is the European energy sector, where benchmarking methods are based on actual cost data, which are influenced by managerial inefficiency as well as operational heterogeneity. This paper demonstrates how a conditional nonparametric method, which ...
2016| Endre Bjoerndal, Mette Bjoerndal, Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand
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DIW Discussion Papers 1532 / 2015
The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German manufacturing firms. The empirical results show, once TAW is taken into account, that: i) labor productivity ...
2015| Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1531 / 2015
This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service production function for the retail sector is derived with labour and external services as the main inputs. A structural ...
2015| Caroline Stiel, Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand
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DIW Discussion Papers 1526 / 2015
While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple technologies. Using a metafrontier Malmquist decomposition and frontier estimation based on stochastic non-smooth ...
2015| Stefan Seifert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1523 / 2015
We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990-2009 period. Our empirical results suggest that phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as – unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions – phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies ...
2015| Joseph Clougherty, Tomaso Duso, Miyu Lee, Jo Seldeslachts