UniversitĂ  della Svizzera italiana

Efficiency measurement in network industries : application to the Swiss railway companies

Farsi, Mehdi ; Filippini, Massimo ; Greene, William

In: Journal of Regulatory Economics, 2005, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 69-90

The persistence of increasingly high government subsidies in Switzerland’s railroads has led the federal and cantonal authorities to discussing the possibility of high-powered incentive contracts such as those based on cost efficiency benchmarking. Railways are however, characterized by a high degree of unobserved heterogeneity that could bias the efficiency estimates. This paper examines the...