Property Rights versus Public Spirit: Ownership and Efficiency of U.S. Electric Utilities Prior to Rate-of-Return Regulation

William Hausman () and John Neufeld ()

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 1991, vol. 73, issue 3, 414-23

Abstract: For over a century, American economists have been engaged in a vigorous theoretical and empirical debate over the economic performance of publicly-owned versus privately-owned electric utilities. The authors review the historical debate and use micro data collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1897-98 to construct efficiency measures based on a nonparametric frontier production function. Since this is prior to state rate-of-return regulation, regulatory effects do not confound the analysis. The authors find that publicly-owned electric utilities were significantly more efficient than their privately-owned counterparts. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

Date: 1991
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