Regulatory Process & OIRA | Reseach

A Process for Cleaning Up Federal Regulations

Insights from BRAC and the Dutch Administrative Burden Reduction Programme
Joshua C. Hall, Michael Williams | Dec 20, 2012
This paper suggests a process to identify, evaluate, and eliminate inefficient regulations. Combining lessons from two successful government reform programs—the Base Realignment and Closure Act in the United States and the Dutch Administrative Burden Reduction Programme—the proposed framework would identify the regulatory costs associated with a historical piece of legislation and create a target for reduction in regulatory costs.

Regulatory Benefits: Examining Agency Justification For New Regulations

Sherzod Abdukadirov | Dec 18, 2012
This study attempts to shed some light on whether the benefits claimed by the federal agencies are likely to be achieved. In contrast to other validation studies, the study focuses on the agencies’ benefit claims rather than the actually measured benefits. Since agencies justify their regulatory decisions based on expected benefits, examining the quality of these claims is important.

The Alternative of Private Regulation: The London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market as a Model

Edward Stringham, Ivan Chen | Oct 18, 2012
A system of private regulation gives more firms access to capital markets and more choices to investors, and it can be viewed as a model for other markets to follow.

RegData: The Industry-Specific Regulatory Constraint Database (IRCD)

A Numerical Database on Industry-specific Regulations for All U.S. Industries and Federal Regulations, 1997-2010
Omar Ahmad Al-Ubaydli, Patrick McLaughlin | Oct 15, 2012
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.

Risk Assessment, Safety Assessment, and the Estimation of Regulatory Benefits

Richard Belzer | Oct 10, 2012
Most federal agencies are required to conduct benefit-cost analyses for their largest regulations. Benefit-cost analysis is intended to objectively inform decision makers about the myriad effects of a range of potential alternatives. For many regulations, benefit-cost analyses depend on health risk assessment. It is well established that a clear conceptual distinction must be established and maintained between (positive) risk assessment and (normative) risk management. Decision makers cannot ensure that regulatory choices conform with their intentions if they cannot discern where the science in an analysis ends and value judgments begin.

Inflated Benefits in Agencies' Economic Analysis

Sherzod Abdukadirov, Deema Yazigi | Aug 21, 2012
Regulatory impact analyses can serve as an important tool. They are designed to help policymakers consider a proposed regulation’s potential impact on the economy as a whole, not simply the interests of those lobbying for that regu- lation. When federal agencies conduct such analyses, how- ever, they often fail to comply with requirements enunciated in executive orders from presidents of both political parties over the past few decades. As a result, agency estimates of benefits are often fragmentary and unreliable, leading to ineffective regulation and wasting of public resources.

Continuity, Change, and Priorities: The Quality and Use of Regulatory Analysis Across U.S. Administrations

Published in
Regulation and Governance
Patrick McLaughlin, Jerry Ellig, John Morrall | Aug 12, 2012
This paper compares the quality and use of regulatory analysis accompanying economically significant regulations proposed by US executive branch agencies in 2008, 2009, and 2010. We find that the quality of regulatory analysis is generally low, but varies widely.

Baselines

A Fundamental Element of Regulatory Impact Analysis
Jerry Ellig, James Broughel | Jun 22, 2012
This Mercatus on Policy explores the importance of baselines in assessing the benefits and costs of federal regulations.

State Regulatory Review: A 50 State Analysis of Effectiveness

Russell S. Sobel and John A. Dove | Jun 14, 2012
In this paper we have provided the first systematic empirical study of how differences in the regulatory review processes across all 50 U.S. states affect the level of regulation.