Books by Paul W. MacAvoy

In recent years, government regulation of industry has had effects throughout the economy. What began nearly a century ago as a single federal agency to curb monopolistic practices of utilities and railroads has become a maze of commissions applying pricing or investment constraints on industries both with and without monopoly power.

Northeast Utilities Company adopted a new competitive strategy in the mid-1980s. Curtailing outlays on nuclear operations meant high risk that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would close the plants because of prolonged outages. This is just what happened in 1996. This book describes ten years of corporate performance preceding the shutdown.

Three decades ago, federal policymakersRepublicans and Democratsembarked on a general strategy of deregulation. In the electricity, gas delivery, and telecommunications industries, the strategy called for restructuring to separate production from transmission and distribution, followed by elimination of price controls. The expected results were lower prices and increased quality, reliability, and scope of services. Paul W. MacAvoy, an economist with forty years of experience in the regulatory field, here assesses the results and concludes that deregulation has failed to achieve any of these goals in any of these industries.MacAvoy shows that we now have only partial deregulation, a mixture of oligopoly structure with direct price control. He explores why this system leads to volatile and high prices, reduced investment, and low profitability, and what policy actions can be implemented to address these problems.