Power to the People: Does Ownership Type Influence Electricity Service?
研究了风暴后电力中断中，市政公用事业与投资者所有的公用事业在维护支出和供电可靠性上的差异，发现市政公用事业维护支出更高但停电影响更大。
After storm-related power outages, many have recommended municipalizing investor-owned utilities, claiming that profit-making utilities have insufficient incentive to prepare for storms. I provide empirical evidence that municipal utilities spend more on maintenance of their distribution network than investor-owned utilities. Nonetheless, I find that storms significantly disrupt electricity consumption in areas served by municipal utilities but do not disrupt areas served by investor-owned utilities. These results are based on a stratified random sample of 241 investor-owned, 96 cooperative, and 94 municipal utilities in the United States between 1999 and 2012. I conclude that municipal utilities’ in-efficiencies are more important in causing power outages than investor-owned utilities’ disincentives to spend on maintenance.