The governance of infrastructure institutions in the financial markets – namely exchanges, central counter-parties (CCPs), and central securities depositories (CSDs) – has become a matter of significant commercial, regulatory, legislative, and even political concern. Such institutions play a...

Numerous regulatory reform proposals would require federal agencies to conduct more thorough economic analysis of proposed regulations or expand the resources and influence of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which currently reviews executive branch regulations. Such...

The number of regulations and their economic impact continue to grow. Yet the quality and use of economic analysis to inform regulatory decisions falls far short of the standards enunciated in executive orders governing regulatory analysis and review. Both the president and Congress have...

Scholarly research demonstrates that Regulatory Impact Analysis often falls short of the standards articulated in executive orders and Office of Management and Budget guidance. More often than not, agencies do not appear to use the Regulatory Impact Analysis to inform major decisions. Regulatory...

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. Budget regulations, which define...

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University initiated its Regulatory Report Card project in 2009 to assess how well executive branch regulatory agencies conduct and use regulatory impact analysis and to identify ways to motivate improvement. Report Card evaluations reveal that agencies often...

Independent regulatory agencies face increasing pressure to conduct high-quality economicanalysis of regulations, similar to the regulatory impact analysis conducted by executive branchagencies. Such analysis could be required by evolving judicial doctrines, regulatory reformstatutes, or...

Civil liability of rating agencies has to strike a balance between over-deterrence and overly lax behavior control. The resulting problems of a capital market freeze and difficulties of proof, as they become apparent in most legal systems and the European Commission's Draft Proposal to amend the...

Many regulators have concluded that cost-benefit analysis is the best available method for capturing the welfare effects of regulations. It is therefore understandable that in recent years, some people have been interested in requiring financial regulators to engage in careful cost-benefit...

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the...