Do Private Utilities Outperform Local Government-Owned Utilities? Evidence from German Retail Electricity

Artikel

Against the background of remunicipalisation trends in European public service sectors, this paper estimates firm-level productivity for German electricity retailers and tests whether the ownership type has a significant impact on productivity. We specify a production function for the retail sector with labour and external services as main inputs, which is estimated using a control function approach. Employing a newly constructed dataset on German utilities by the German Federal Statistical Office for the years 2003-12, we find that firm-level productivity generally increased until 2008 but not afterwards. We do not find any evidence for ownership having an impact on productivity.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: German Economic Review ; ISSN: 1465-6485 ; Volume: 19 ; Year: 2020 ; Issue: 4 ; Pages: 401-425 ; Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: productivity ; retail electricity ; ownership ; structural prodction function

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Stiel, Caroline ; Cullmann, Astrid ; Nieswand, Maria
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): De Gruyter ; ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
• (where): Berlin, Boston
• (when): 2018

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1111/geer.12134
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/223233
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET