Entflechtung und Produktivität im Stromerzeugungssektor

The European electricity directives mainly focusing on Unbundling are the most important tools of electricity market regulation. Therefore, the core of these directives aiming to facilitate the market entry in the stage of generation by splitting up vertically integrated firms into independent parts is an application of the Unbundling approach. Using a dataset containing firm-level data on firms operating in 12 European countries from 2005 to 2014, this study provides an econometric analysis to understand the effects of the implementation of the third directive (2009/72/EG) on the productivity of electricity generators. The overall results show that the effect depends on the regulatory closeness of the regimes before and after the implementation. In particular, moving from Legal Unbundling to Ownership Unbundling is associated with significant increases in productivity and competition.