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Eszter Ujj

Senior Consultant

Eszter Ujj is a Senior Consultant at Europe Economics with over five years of experience in advising clients on regulatory and competition issues including price controls, consumer and competition policy and impact assessments. She has significant experience in providing high-quality economic analysis spanning numerous sectors including financial services, water, energy and transport.

 

Eszter Ujj is a Senior Consultant at Europe Economics with over five years of experience in advising clients on regulatory and competition issues including price controls, consumer and competition policy and impact assessments. She has significant experience in providing high-quality economic analysis spanning numerous sectors including financial services, water, energy and transport.

 

Her experience includes supporting price reviews for regulators (e.g. Ofwat and ORR), assessing the costs and benefits of proposed policies (e.g. restricting the use of single use plastics), providing advice on regulatory and policy issues (e.g. an incentive mechanism for the business retail market), conducting market reviews (e.g. for claims companies in the UK Delay Repay market) and analysing the value and contribution of different sectors and stakeholders to national and global economies (e.g. for a pharmaceutical company). Eszter has also been seconded to the Financial Conduct Authority where her work focused on developing an economic assessment framework to inform policy development around access to cash in the UK. She is an experienced project manager and has managed a range of studies for both public and private sector clients including Ofwat, PSR, Citizens Advice and the Scottish Government.

Eszter holds an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford and speaks English, Spanish and French, in addition to her native Hungarian.

Contact Details

Support in price review process

Providing support on the cost of capital and financeability to regulated firms or regulators in the context of price control reviews (e.g. by providing them with analysis and assisting them in responding to representations from other parties). Our wider price control expertise is presented in more detail here.

Ofwat

Our personnel have been seconded multiple times to Ofwat, and we have carried out various discrete studies analysing the water sector from different perspectives. Some of these have involved cost assessment support for RAPID gate two assessment; advising on important aspects of Ofwat’s approach to the cost of equity for PR24 and; assisting with the investigation of the potential for improving Ofwats’s methodology to mergers’ assessment.

European Commission, DG CLIMA

We have conducted several studies for DG CLIMA relating to the European Union’s emissions trading system.   For example, we conducted a study looking at the impact of changes in trading activity on the price formation processes in the European carbon market, the access to the market for retail investors, which included also the access via exchange traded funds (ETFs), the hedging strategies of EU emissions trading system (ETS) compliance entities, and the role played by derivatives and financial entities in the EU ETS.

Danish Energy Regulator (Energistyrelsen)

We looked at how a benchmarking model used to help set price controls by the Energistyrelsen on DSOs might affect the Green Transition.  We looked at the challenges facing DSOs in the Green Transition and what behaviours should be incentivised.  We then looked at how the benchmarking model and wider regulatory framework might affect those incentives.  This included developing a number of worked examples to consider how the benchmarking model might affect incentives to invest in network expansion, faster connections or flexibility solutions. 

Zero Waste Scotland

Europe Economics was engaged by Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) to estimate how potential efficiency savings in water and energy are likely to be distributed across firms of different sizes and ownership structures in Scotland. The aim was to inform ZWS policy of where to target resource saving initiatives; in particular whether potential savings were sufficiently concentrated among SMEs to warrant specific effort among these.

We was also engaged by ZWS to estimate the costs and benefits of proposed market restrictions on specific single-use plastic products in Scotland and to analyse the impacts of the restrictions on competition, consumers and Scottish firms.

Citizens Advice UK

We were commissioned by Citizens Advice UK to investigate the mechanisms that could be used to limit or share the financial risk for energy bill payers in the context of highly anticipatory energy infrastructure investments in GB.

We developed a compendium of risk-allocation tools and, for each, we analysed: the suitability of the mechanism for different types of investments and projects; the extent (and the type) of risk allocated to consumers; the relative advantages and disadvantages of the tool; and how they affect the cost of capital. Each tool also included a case study of the tool being applied in practice.

Professional regulation

Healthcare professionals are the driving force behind the delivery of high-quality care. Outcomes can be affected by external structures and systems as well as individuals’ training and incentives. Economic regulation is one tool that can assist healthcare regulators discern between contextual, clinical and competency risks facing a healthcare profession and its workforce, and develop targeted and cost-effective regulation and training. Our work includes:
  • A seminal assessment of the risks in domiciliary social care and options for revalidation and training to address these risks for the Department of Health, in the context of the Government’s White Paper on non-medical healthcare regulation.
  • Similar assessments of the risks and options for revalidation to address these risks for the General Optical Council; the General Dental Council; and the General Chiropractic Council.
  • A cost-benefit analysis of options for continuing professional development (CPD) for the General Dental Council.
  • Cost-benefit analysis of regulation models for optical businesses for the General Optical Council.

Policy development and impact assessment

As societies and technologies change, it is vital to understand and test the value of medical innovations and new care models. Our expertise in impact assessment and wider understanding of health- and social care markets enable us to advise policy-makers and funders how to prioritise policies and interventions needed to support the delivery of health and medical care. Our work includes:

  • Assessment of the economic, social and innovation impact of Novartis UK. We also undertook as similar study for Novartis Netherlands.
  • Analysis of regulatory models of telemedicine for the General Medical Council.
  • Assessment of the value and savings attributable to Look Ahead’s integration social care and housing model.

Intellectual property and pricing

We understand the importance of protecting intellectual property in pharmaceuticals and incentivising innovation, and the need to provide cost-effective access to medicines and healthcare. We advise on the design and impact of intellectual property policies and payment and reimbursement systems within the challenges and opportunities of a European and global pharmaceuticals market, applying learning from other regulated sectors. Our work includes:

  • For Merck Sharp and Dohme, an assessment of the practice of importing patented medicines across Europe, and the implications for the market of increased transparency of prices.
  • We delivered a study to Efpia on the impacts on the EU of the exclusion of patent extension provisions, in respect of medicines, from the forthcoming EU-MERCOSUR free trade agreement.
  • We produced a report for EuropaBio on the costs to the European patented medicines sector from a change on the current SPC framework.
  • For the European Patent Office, we studied the economic effects of introducing a grace period in Europe using as the main source of information a survey of those that have filed for patent protection in Europe the US and Japan.
  • Amongst our many projects on parallel trade, we have done four major studies for the European Commission on aspects of parallel trade relating to patient safety and counterfeiting, in both the medicines and medical devices sectors.