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Stephen Topping

Principal

Stephen Topping has over 20 years’ experience of providing economic advice to clients across a range of sectors. Before joining Europe Economics in 2004, he worked at another economics consultancy.

Stephen Topping has over 20 years’ experience of providing economic advice to clients across a range of sectors. Before joining Europe Economics in 2004, he worked at another economics consultancy.

Stephen has extensive experience advising clients on price controls and the cost of capital, with a track record in the electricity, gas, water, rail and airport sectors. He has worked on secondment within a number of regulators, including Ofwat (three times), Ofcom and Ofgem. He also has significant experience in impact assessment of public policy — for example, he has authored a handbook on the subject and conducted impact assessments for the European Commission. Stephen has wider expertise in competition economics (including competition frameworks in the utilities sectors), consumer policy and behavioural economics. He also leads Europe Economics’ work on the provision of economics training courses.

Alongside his work at Europe Economics, Stephen is an evangelical Christian preacher. He believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and is relying on the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross for the forgiveness of his sins.

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Critique of regulatory judgements

One form of legal case involves a challenge to regulatory decisions. We offer expert witness assistant assessing whether regulatory decisions are in line with established policy objectives or regulatory precedent and what the competition or other implications are of those decisions or alternatives.

Assessment of profitability or cost of capital

In regulated price controls, a key input is the determined cost of capital. This has often been a subject of appeals against regulatory judgements. Cost of capital analysis also feeds into assessments of profitability in assessing whether firms have been charging prices above the competitive level, and into the valuation of research pipelines in mergers.

Critique of econometric, quantitative methods or data used to support regulatory decisions

One form of a legal case is judicial revision of policy decisions. Such policy decisions are often supported by quantitative models. Those models can be critiqued in various ways – criticised or defended on the basis of their methodology or the data used.