Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/162264 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
Nota di Lavoro No. 22.2017
Publisher: 
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), Milano
Abstract: 
Some regulatory reforms do not change just a specific signal that can be represented by a quantitative continuous variable, such as a tax rate, a price cap, or an emission threshold. The standard theory of reform in applied welfare economics (going back to contributions by e.g. Ramsey, Samuelson and Guesnerie) asks the question: What is the marginal effect on social welfare of changing a policy signal? However, reforms such as privatization, unbundling or liberalization of network industries are often described by ‘packages’ shifting a policy framework. It is increasingly frequent in the empirical evaluation of such reforms to use categorical variables, often in polytomous form, for instance describing unbundling steps (vertical integration, accounting, functional, legal, ownership separation) on a discrete numerical scale, such as those proposed by the OECD and other international bodies. We review recent econometric literature evaluating regulatory reforms using such variables (40 papers) and we discuss some methodological issues arising in this context.
Subjects: 
Econometrics
Policy Evaluation
Network Industries
Reforms
JEL: 
B41
C20
C54
D04
L98
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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