Ex Ante Rates of Return for Regulated Utilitiest
分析了公用事业监管中回报率设定的困难，指出名义与实际回报的混合导致问题，并建议采用事前而非事后回报率，以更好反映市场影响。
Willard Carleton [1974] recently demonstrated some subtle difficulties in the rate-of-return regulation of public utilities. Accounting rather than genuine opportunity costs influence the rates that are set. And because there is no way to undo the consequences whenever regulatory lag prevents immediate adjustments to changes in the cost of capital, there simply is no way to reflect genuine market effects on firms' values. The main cause of these difficulties demonstrated by Carleton is the impossibility of continuously maintaining through administrative machinery an allowed rate of return in real terms. But the regulatory task is also made more difficult by the fact that a mixture of nominal and real returns is supposed to determine the allowed rate of return, according to the influential Hope Natural Gas Co. decision.1 We shall illustrate the role of this latter provision by contrasting the effects of a change in bond interest rates on a regulated versus an unregulated firm. And to avoid the consequent difficulties we suggest an alternative regulatory procedure similar to that proposed by Justice Brandeis in the Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. case.2 He proposed reliance on nominal rather than real returns in public utility regulation; we urge negotiation of returns on an ex ante rather than an ex post basis. When a rate of return is established for a regulated utility today, it typically has two main parts: a return in real terms and one in nominal terms. The nominal return is the return allowed to bondholders, while the real return is the return allowed equity capital, and the two are weighted together based on the proportions of debt and equity capital in the firm's capital structure.3 Ordinarily we expect competitive markets to yield returns on assets in real terms, but the returns allowed regulated firms under Supreme Court decisions gradually have shifted away from an entirely real return on assets. Wide-ranging arguments over real returns followed the Smyth v. Ames decision (1898),4 with its return on fair value guideline. A nominal return was first urged in Justice Brandeis' concurring minority opinion in the Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. case, which influenced the Hope decision. As grounds for dissenting from the opinion of the Court in Southwestern