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Optimal Response to Shift in Regulatory Regime: the Case of the U.S. Nuclear Power Industry

 
Paper:ewp-io/9508002
From: John Rust <   > 
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 16:26:41 CDT

Abstract:
Abstract: This paper studies the impact of the March 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) accident on the regulation of nuclear power plants (NPPs) and its consequences for the operating behavior and profitability of the U.S. nuclear power industry. We treat the TMI accident as a ``natural experiment'' that caused a sudden, unexpected, and permanent increase in the intensity of safety regulation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and a shift toward increased disallowances of operating costs by state and local public utility commissions (PUCs). We analyze the nuclear power industry's reaction to this shift in regulatory regime using detailed monthly data on NPP operations collected by the NRC. We find that the industry has been very responsive to NRC regulation insofar as they impute a significantly higher cost to ``imprudent'' operation of a reactor in the post-TMI period than in the pre-TMI period. We find that while NPPs appear safer in the post-TMI period (in terms of having a lower rate of forced outages), they are also substantially less profitable: over 90\% of the expected discounted profits from continued operation of existing NPPs have been eliminated in the post-TMI period. Interestingly, we find that the hypothesis of expected discounted profit maximization provides a much better approximation to NPP operating behavior in the post-TMI period than in the pre-TMI period.

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EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.

In 2005, Arts and Sciences commandeered the computing services that I had provided to the Department of Economics since 1987. Some might say that the department was sold out, others would (erroneously) claim that centralization is efficient, and still others would claim that I have few marketing skills.

I was told that I could keep operating EconWPA (as well as many other services including rfe.wustl.edu, barnett.wustl.edu, and three RePEc servers) but I would receive no support (hardware, software, or anthing else) and (as had been the case) no compensation. At that point, given the apparent low valuation of my activities by the department, and university, it made no sense for me to continue operating EconWPA or other services.

Thanks to all who have supported EconWPA in the past.

A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006