This paper reviews the current evidence supporting the benefits of improving automobile safety by regulation of product design, and proceeds to an independent evaluation of the effects. Technological studies imply that annual highway deaths would be 20 percent greater without legally mandated installation of various safety devices on automobiles. However, this literature ignores offsetting effects of nonregulatory demand for safety and driver response to the devices. This article indicates that these offsets are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths. Time-series (but not cross-section) data imply some saving of auto occupants' lives at the expense of more pedestrian deaths and more nonfatal accidents, a pattern consistent with optimal driver response to regulation

The purpose of this article is to provide evidence on the value of government regulation of accounting reports. The banking industry was initially exempt from the disclosure provisions of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, because the U.S. Congress apparently felt that the banking industry was already regulated. In 1964, the Securities Acts were amended to require specifically that the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation regulate bank financial reporting. To test whether or not the informational content of state bank financial statements increased after the regulations, some surrogate for information must be used, because information itself is not directly measurable. Changes in security prices are commonly used as a proxy for information because stock prices represent weighted averages of investor expectations. The test based on the stable symmetric distribution and the non-parametric test both indicate that the announcement of bank financial data is associated with unexpected price movements which is consistent with the belief that financial statements contain information that investors act on

Journal Article Incentive Pricing and Utility Regulation: A Comment Get access Thomas E. Kennedy Thomas E. Kennedy Kansas State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 89, Issue 2, May 1975, Pages 311–313, https://doi.org/10.2307/1884436 Published: 01 May 1975

Michael J. Brennan, Willard T. Carleton, Stewart C. Myers, Session Topic: Financial Models of Regulated Firms: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 30, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, San Francisco, California, December 28-30, 1974 (May, 1975), pp. 446-450

Edwin J. Elton, Martin J. Gruber, Zvi Lieber, Valuation, Optimum Investment and Financing for the Firm Subject to Regulation, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 30, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, San Francisco, California, December 28-30, 1974 (May, 1975), pp. 401-425

Electricity accounts for about 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States and its share of total consumption has been increasing slowly. In an effort to decrease the vulnerability of the United States to foreign energy price increases and embargoes, Federal energy policy, particularly as formulated in the Federal Energy Administration Report for Project Independence, would accelerate this trend towards electricity. These policies call for the mandatory conversion of household and commercial heating to electricity and the conversion of oiland gas-burning plants to domestically available coal and uranium. Even without such mandatory controls, consumers may choose more electricity as a result of increases in fuel oil prices relative to electricity prices, or as a result of the shortage of natural gas, or because electricity supply seems more secure. Although Federal policies and consumer choice may shift demands towards electricity, there is no assurance that the additional quantities and mix of generating capacity desired will in fact be forthcoming. The nation's investor-owned utilities (providing over 90 percent of generating capacity) are not likely to be able to raise the required amounts of capital. Increases in construction costs, fuel costs, and interest charges have recently outstripped revenue growth, and expectations that this trend will continue have made utility investments unattractive. The suspicion is that regulatory procedures have recently caused price increases to lag behind cost increases, resulting in earned rates of return below the cost of capital. If this continues, capacity to meet increased demands-and Project Independence, in whatever form-will not be achieved. The purpose of this paper is to assess the financial prospects of the nation's electric utility industry, given existing regulatory institutions and continued high rates of growth of demand in the late 1970's. Shortages from regulation would indeed be a turn of events. Economists' analyses of regulatory effects in the 1960's deplored the behavior of commissions on the grounds that they did nothing to control prices (see G. J. Stigler and C. Friedland and R. Jackson). However, the turn of events would not be entirely surprising; using the behavioral approach in analyzing regulation leads one to suspect that commissions operate relatively independent of economic conditions (see Joskow, 1972). The well-established operating rules of the bureaucracies change only when the results of such procedures under inflation or depression become intolerable (see Joskow, 1974). What may have been ineffective regulation in the 1960's may be overzealous regulation for the late 1970's

This paper discusses general principles for choosing bank assets and liabilities, for deciding on when to make a loan and what interest rate to charge, for pricing funds transfer services such as the handling of checks, for establishing compensating balance requirements, and for dealing with government regulation. The discussion assumes markets are efficient and deals first with an unregulated environment and then with policies in the face of regulatory constraints. Most of the policies which would be optimal in an unregulated environment will be optimal in the regulated environment such as in the U.S. today, because it is relatively easy to get around most of the regulations that are applied to banks by the use of non-deposit liabilities, compensating balances and negative checking accounts