Public utility regulation and bond ratings

This paper investigates the extent to which political factors, which vary across state Public Utility Commissions, affect electric utility bond ratings. The paper focuses on the effects of the commissioner selection method (election or appointment) and other politically determined variables on bond ratings of privately owned and regulated electric utilities. The paper develops a generalization of ordered logit that allows the latent risk measure to have a skewed and thicktailed distribution. The distributional assumption underlying the standard logit model is strongly rejected. Empirically, both political variables and financial variables are determinants of electric utility bond ratings, and election of the PUC has a strong negative effect on bond ratings.