The effect on the regulation of the productivity efficiency: An application to the European railway companies

This investigation offers a first theoretical and empirical study which analyses the effect of the regulation on the productivity in European railways. To do this, we have estimated a system based in the duality theory of the distance functions, using a panel data with 17 European railways. We have calculated the marginal cost of the regulation and, from the results, we can deduce that the technology is sensitive to the regulating framework in which they perform their activity. Moreover, we have calculated and analysed temporally the allocative inefficiency.