When OSHA was established, proponents believed it would dramatically improve the safety and health of American workers. During the forty years of its existence, workplace fatalities and nonfatal injuries and illnesses have fallen but OSHA is not the major cause of this decline. Changes in the industrial mix of workers and improvements in safety technology have combined with expanded employer incentives unrelated to OSHA to decrease worker injuries and illnesses. The financial incentives for employers to expand expenditures on worker safety and health created by the labor market, states' workers' compensation insurance programs, and the legal system swamp the meager incentives created by OSHA.

The Industry-specific Regulatory Constraint Database (IRCD) is a new database that quantifies federal regulation. IRCD offers a novel and objective measure of the accumulation of regulations in the economy overall and for all the different industries in the U.S. IRCD uses text analysis to count the number of binding constraints in the text of federal regulations, which are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). In addition, it measures the degree to which different groups of regulations target specific industries.

This working paper analyzes the methods and outcomes of government efforts to control obesity rates.

This working paper finds that the quality and use of analysis for the ACA interim final rules falls well below that of conventional notice-and-comment rulemaking by other agencies, including HHS. The poor quality of analysis in the examined ACA rules is comparable to the quality of analysis that accompanied a series of interim final homeland security regulations issued by the Bush administration following 9/11. This suggests that institutional—rather than partisan—factors explain why the quality of regulatory analysis declines when agencies implement significant presidential priorities on short deadlines.