Regulatory policy has long been a source of controversy, eliciting criticism and calls for reform from virtually all quarters. In recent years, reform proposals have typically sought to restructure the institutional environment of regulatory policymaking by changing administrative law and...

With expanding global trade, the challenge of protecting consumers from unsafe food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products has grown increasingly salient, necessitating the development of new policy ideas and analysis. This chapter introduces the book, Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in...

The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015 not only pushed that company’s stock and retail sales into freefall, but also raised serious questions about the efficacy of existing regulatory controls. The same furtive actions taken by Volkswagen had been taken nearly twenty years earlier by...

While holding great promise, nanotechnology also raises concerns about currently unknown health and environmental risks. The lack of information about these potential risks poses distinct challenges for regulators, who need a clear understanding about problems in order to solve them. Under such...

We analyze a little-studied regulatory approach that we call management-based regulation. Management-based regulation directs regulated organizations to engage in a planning process that aims toward the achievement of public goals, offering firms flexibility in how they achieve these goals. The...

Regulators need to rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but over reliance on science can actually contribute to, or at least deflect attention from, incoherent policymaking. In this article, we explore the problems with using science to...

Deciding whether to regulate involves more than making a choice between complete freedom and total control. Individuals and businesses can be regulated but still retain considerable discretion – even to the point of selecting on their own the rules that apply to themselves. In this paper, we...

Government regulators have shown considerable interest in encouraging businesses to participate in voluntary environmental programs and practice environmental stewardship in ways that go beyond what regulations require. At the same time, researchers have increasingly worked to understand how...

“Flexible regulation” might sound like an oxymoron but it has become a widely accepted catch phrase for a pragmatic approach to regulation that promises the achievement of important public policy objectives at relatively low cost. Given the growing interest in flexible regulation in recent...