[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-294146-105":59,"doc-detail-294146-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":123,"head_meta":125,"extra_data":127,"updated_unix":129},105,"en","do-markets-reduce-prices-discussion-paper","Do Markets Reduce Prices? - Discussion Paper","","This discussion paper analyzes the reasons and outcomes of “make or buy” decisions in local public services, focusing on their effects on prices and other performance determinants. It uses a multi-year, city-level dataset of French water utilities. The study finds private management correlates with higher prices on average, with mixed significance for public-to-private switches and no consistent price-decreasing effect for private-to-public switches. Methodological implications are also discussed.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/do-markets-reduce-prices-discussion-paper/294146/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/do-markets-reduce-prices-discussion-paper/294146.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Nguyễn Văn Học","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-18","2026-09-17",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":52},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What does the paper investigate about public services?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It investigates how “make or buy” choices in local public services relate to prices and other performance determinants, with a focus on the impact of private management.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What data and setting does the study use?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The paper uses a city-level dataset of water utilities in France observed over several years (1998, 2001, 2004, and 2008).",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What are the main findings on price differences between public and private management?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Private provision is associated with higher prices on average, though the premium is smaller than simple comparisons suggest. For switchers, price changes can go in expected directions but are not always statistically significant.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},294146,1789676025,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":52,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":129,"read_time":144,"preview_page_count":4},1374402739827,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/14000c97e7351f1a627?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1787885694763230660","EPPP DP No. 2012-07  \nDo Markets Reduce Prices ?  \nSimon Porcher  \nDecember 2012  \nDISCUSSION PAPER SERIES  \n|  | Chaire Economie des Partenariats Public-Privé Institut d’Administration des Entreprises |  |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n|  |  |  |\n|  |  |  |\n\nDo Markets Reduce Prices? ∗  \nSimon PORCHER  \nIAE Sorbonne Business School  \nSeptember 25, 2012  \nAbstract  \nThis paper looks at the reasons for and results of make or buy in local public services, with specific regards to its possible effects on price and other performance determinants. It uses a rich city-level dataset of water utilities in France for several years. We find evidence that private management is associated with higher prices on average ceteris paribus. This pattern is consistent with the study of units switching from an organization to another. We find that municipalities switching from public to private management face increased price but the effect is not always significant. Our results also show that switching from private to public management does not always foster decreasing prices. We finally discuss several reasons for the price gap between public and private management using extrasamples. We also present some methodological implications for researchers working on the link between organization and efficiency.  \nJEL Codes: L14-L33-L95 . Keywords: public-private partnerships, water, efficiency, ownership, differences-in-differences, propensity score matching.  \n∗We acknowledge the help of Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux for the collection of a subsample of data. We thank Decio Coviello and John de Figueiredo for their suggestions on the preliminary version of this paper. We are also grateful to Stéphane Saussier, Eshien Chong and Julie de Brux for their helpful comments. Thanks to Jean Beuve, John Moore, Lisa Chever, Anissa Boulemia, Tra Phuon Tran and Aude Le Lannier for being present at various PhD seminars and having commented on the results of this paper. Errors are ours.  \n1 Introduction  \nFor the last forty years, the role of the public sector in providing basic services such as electricity, gas, water or telephone with a natural monopoly component was hardly questioned. All over the world thousands of regulated monopolies have been opened to competition for service provision with different options to organize the supply of goods. A large part of the theoretical literature on the subject, based on organizational performance, heavily draws on landmark works by Coase [1937] and Williamson [1975] . For these authors 1 , the governance structure of a transaction is a function of the relative costs of transacting in markets and organizing procurement within the firm. “Misalignment”between governance structure and transaction characteristics potentially has large efficiency effects: an organizational form that is superior will always result in large efficiency gains compare with how the same unit would have performed under the other alternative.  \nThis paper studies the impact of private management on retail price in residential water industries in France. As an empirical laboratory, we use a representative dataset of 2,455 French cities observed four years: 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2008 . A first look at simple patterns in the data is instructive. A first glance at Table (1) shows how the prices are related to the organizational form. The price premium is almost 30 euros on average for a standard bill. Other studies on the subject show that private management is often associated with higher prices, even if the price premium lowers when one takes into account panel data and sufficient controls for heterogeneity between utilities (see for example Chong et al. [2006] for a cross-sectional study of 5,000 French water utilities in 2001 and Chong et al. [2012] for a panel study of 3,700 water utilities between 1998 and 2008) .  \nWe first analyze average differences in retail prices between public and private provision using different regressors controlling for heterogeneity between observations and organ","cbCain7Vpq0X9kel","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCain7Vpq0X9kel","pdf",657902,42,"English","# Introduction\n## Institutional background and governance\n## Research design and data\n## Main empirical results\n## Explanations for price gaps","[{\"question\":\"What does the paper investigate about public services?\",\"answer\":\"It investigates how “make or buy” choices in local public services relate to prices and other performance determinants, with a focus on the impact of private management.\"},{\"question\":\"What data and setting does the study use?\",\"answer\":\"The paper uses a city-level dataset of water utilities in France observed over several years (1998, 2001, 2004, and 2008).\"},{\"question\":\"What are the main findings on price differences between public and private management?\",\"answer\":\"Private provision is associated with higher prices on average, though the premium is smaller than simple comparisons suggest. For switchers, price changes can go in expected directions but are not always statistically significant.\"}]","Do Markets Reduce Prices? - Discussion Paper | PDF",106]