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Enron Mail |
I am not trying to flog an issue or point, but in going through some recent,
but still dated, e-mails, I saw this one from Professor Littlechild. It gives you some sense of what he is trying to work on for us. It does not really do justice to all that he can do and has done, but before I delete this, I wanted to pass it along. I know Peter supposedly has this marked in his diary for cancellation on the day it comes due, and you may well decide that that is the appropriate course of action, but at least wanted to pass this along, because I think any decision to cancel needs your objective evaluation, something I think is lacking in Peter's judgment (how you can decide to cancel without having seen the man's work, plus I do not think Peter appreciates/understands the value, nor the nuances, of the argument that you need a contracts market and retail competition, otherwise he would support this work, since it bears directly on the Acceleration Directives that he is supposed to be pushing in Brussels!). Hope all is going well. See you at the PRC if not sooner. mcs -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Littlechild [mailto:littlechild@tanworth.mercianet.co.uk] Sent: 29 March 2001 12:08 To: Mark Schroeder Cc: Kyran Hanks Subject: beginning work Dear Mark We had a brief but helpful meeting on 7 February, since when I have discussed and signed a contract with Annette Patrick. I was hoping to begin work before now, but two lengthy trips abroad have precluded this. I thought it would be helpful to recap where we now are and what I have in mind. You summarised the three topics where further work would be helpful to you as 1. What went wrong in California? (and why it should not preclude further liberalisation in Europe) 2. The importance of accelerated EU directives, including the importance of separation of functions. 3. The importance of retail marketing, including to residential customers. On the first topic, I have recently published a paper in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Winter 2001 edition (which incidentally features Enron in a couple of the other articles). Copy attached. Most of it is familiar stuff but there is a concluding section on California which answers the What went wrong question. We could aim to bring this to a wider audience, but there are lots of papers on this topic now, and the situation changes almost daily, so it may be better to incorporate it into a paper on Europe. On the second topic, I accepted an invitation to address an analysts' conference (UBS Warburg) this coming Monday, on the topic of regulatory policy in Europe and where it is going. I knew nothing about the topic at the time, but thought it would force me to learn. Unfortunately there has been little time to do this so far. The topic ties in with the work we discussed, and if acceptable to you I propose to spend the next couple of days working on it under the contract, with a view not just to the presentation, but to a subsequent paper and publication. I should say that the conference pays a fee, but only enough to cover travel and conference time and the presentation itself, not any underlying research time. I see from press reports that there has been some development or lack of it with respect to discussions on the EU directive. I hope to talk to Kyran on this and related topics, either today or tomorrow, and maybe he has something that he can email me. Perhaps next week we can talk about how to take this work forward, and where to aim at - either a journal like PowerUK, or as a direct input into some EU process. On the third topic, my ideas are embodied in the paper on Joskow that you have seen.The question is how best to publicise and apply these ideas - perhaps in a paper on Europe again? That is, to argue for the importance of the directives in a particular respect, namely retail competition, and to show how California failed to do this adequately? On now to European regulation. Best wishes Stephen
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