Portrait of Christopher Davis

Christopher Davis : Principal

Chris specialises in the economics of regulation and regulatory finance. Since joining Oxera in 2011, he has advised clients on numerous aspects of regulation, including market power assessments, customer engagement, capital expenditure, efficiency, the cost of capital, financeability, cost allocation, regulatory risk, incentive frameworks and outperformance sharing.

Chris has provided support on regulatory and strategic issues to clients in the air traffic control, airport, energy, rail, road, telecoms, and water sectors. He has direct experience of working in Planning and Regulation teams and providing executive-level advice on regulatory strategy. He was seconded into NATS En Route Ltd (NERL) to provide day-to-day support during its appeal of its RP3 price control (2020–24) to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Before this, he undertook secondments at a regulatory authority (NHS Improvement) and a regulated company (Dublin Airport).

Chris coordinates Oxera’s Regulation and Market Design Centre of Excellence and is the course lead for Oxera’s biannual Utility Regulation courses, on which he regularly presents a number of sessions. He has published research papers on the regulation of highways companies across Europe, and approaches to funding and regulating capital expenditure.

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7776 6607

Christopher's specialisms include:

Selected
professional experience

  • Advising Aena on the cost of capital for the second DORA period (2020–21)

  • Advice to Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission in responding to Ofcom’s RIIO-2 Draft Determinations (2020)

  • Advised an appellant water company as part of the Ofwat CMA redetermination (2020)

  • Led Oxera’s advice to Fluvius on the impact of VREG’s proposed approach to remunerating the regulated asset base (2020)

  • Full-time secondment to NATS to advise on its CMA price control redetermination (2019–20)

  • Member of the four-person Ethical Business Regulation Support Group, which has been established to undertake periodic ‘temperature checks’ of the implementation of a new regulatory framework based on the principles of Ethical Business Regulation in the Scottish water sector (2019–)

Selected
publications

  • Davis, C. and Granatstein, M. (2016), ‘Funding large transport infrastructure projects: Challenges, Risks and Opportunities’, European Transport Conference 2016 Proceedings, Association for European Transport, October.

  • Davis, C., Dufour, A. and Perna, P. (2016), ‘Roads funding and regulation in England, France and Italy: an international comparison’, European Transport Conference 2016 Proceedings, Association for European Transport, October.

  • Davis, C., Meaney, A. and Gudgeon, L. (2014), ‘Ensuring Value for Money from Rail Franchise Margins’, European Transport Conference 2014 Proceedings, Association for European Transport, September.

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons), Economics and Management, University of Oxford

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