On its Surface, this book is aimed at the topical issue of regulatory reform. But underneath it strives to go beyond the topical, seeking to analyze regulation as a distinct discipline and to help teach it as a separate subject.
Regulation has become a front-page topic recently, often referenced by politicians in conjunction with the current state of the U.S. economy. Yet despite regulation’s increased presence in current politics and media, The Politics of Regulatory Reform argues that the regulatory process and its influence on the economy is misunderstood by the general public as well as by many politicians. In this book, two experienced regulation scholars confront questions relevant to both academic scholars and those with a general interest in ascertaining the effects and importance of regulation. How does regulation impact the economy? What roles do politicians play in making regulatory decisions? Why do politicians enact laws that require regulations and then try to hamper agencies abilities to issue those same regulations? The authors answer these questions and untangle the misperceptions behind regulation by using an area of regulatory policy that has been underutilized until now. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Shapiro and Borie-Holtz have gathered a unique dataset on the regulatory process and output in the United States. They use state-specific data from twenty-eight states, as well as a series of case studies on regulatory reform, to question widespread impressions and ideas about the regulatory process. The result is an incisive and comprehensive study of the relationship between politics and regulation that also encompasses the effects of regulation and the reasons why regulatory reforms are enacted.
The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.
Over the past fifteen years, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan have transformed the relationship between governments and corporations. The changes are complex and the terms used to describe them often obscure the reality. In Freer Markets, More Rules, Steven K. Vogel dispenses with euphemisms and makes sense of this recent transformation. In defiance of conventional wisdom, Vogel contends that the deregulation revolution of the 1980s and 1990s never happened. The advanced industrial countries moved toward liberalization or freer markets at the same time that they imposed reregulation or more rules. Moreover, the countries involved did not converge in regulatory practice but combined liberalization and reregulation in markedly different ways. The state itself, far more than private interest groups, drove the process of regulatory reform. Thus, the story of deregulation is one rich in paradox: a movement aimed at reducing regulation increased it; a movement propelled by global forces reinforced national differences; and a movement that purported to reduce state power was led by the state itself. Vogel's astute and far-reaching analysis compares deregulation in Britain and Japan, with special attention to the telecommunication and financial services industries. He also considers such important sectors as broadcasting, transportation, and utilities in the United States, France, and Germany.
As an experiment in reconnecting academia to the broader democracy, this work is designed to invigorate public policy debate by rededicating academic work to the pursuit of solutions to society's great problems.
In Securities Regulation Reassessed, Paul Mahoney shows that policy responses to financial crises are broadly similar across place and time: political actors, hoping to avoid blame for a financial crisis, create a narrative of market failure, arguing that misbehavior by securities market participants, rather than prior policy errors, is the primary cause of the crisis. Politically obliged regulators craft reforms that purport to solve problems which are either non-existent or only tangentially related to the crisis; yet they increase the complexity and expense of compliance, resulting in consolidation and concentration of market share in the hands of already leading financial firms. Securities Regulation Reassessed illustrates these points primarily but not exclusively with evidence from the New Deal-era securities reforms in the United States. Against the conventional wisdom that regards the New Deal reforms as successful, Mahoney provides substantial countervailing evidence, showing instead that Congress’s diagnoses were systematically inaccurate and its remedies reduced competition in the securities industry. Looking farther into history, the work treats several key episodes prior to the New Deal, including the English financial crises of 1697 and 1720 and the "blue sky” era of the 1910s and 1920s in the United States. Finally, Mahoney considers the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 from the same analytical perspective. Mahoney finds a predictable pattern for efforts at securities reform: they require huge effort to enact, and yield little objectively measurable payoff and some objectively measurable harm.
The blowout of the Macondo well on April 20, 2010, led to enormous consequences for the individuals involved in the drilling operations, and for their families. Eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig lost their lives and 16 others were seriously injured. There were also enormous consequences for the companies involved in the drilling operations, to the Gulf of Mexico environment, and to the economy of the region and beyond. The flow continued for nearly 3 months before the well could be completely killed, during which time, nearly 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the gulf. Macondo Well-Deepwater Horizon Blowout examines the causes of the blowout and provides a series of recommendations, for both the oil and gas industry and government regulators, intended to reduce the likelihood and impact of any future losses of well control during offshore drilling. According to this report, companies involved in offshore drilling should take a "system safety" approach to anticipating and managing possible dangers at every level of operation-from ensuring the integrity of wells to designing blowout preventers that function under all foreseeable conditions-in order to reduce the risk of another accident as catastrophic as the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. In addition, an enhanced regulatory approach should combine strong industry safety goals with mandatory oversight at critical points during drilling operations. Macondo Well-Deepwater Horizon Blowout discusses ultimate responsibility and accountability for well integrity and safety of offshore equipment, formal system safety education and training of personnel engaged in offshore drilling, and guidelines that should be established so that well designs incorporate protection against the various credible risks associated with the drilling and abandonment process. This book will be of interest to professionals in the oil and gas industry, government decision makers, environmental advocacy groups, and others who seek an understanding of the processes involved in order to ensure safety in undertakings of this nature.
The goal of regulatory reform is to improve national economies and enhance their ability to adapt to change. Better regulation and structural reforms are necessary complements to sound fiscal and macroeconomic policies. Continual and far-reaching ...
This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.