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...

In diverse areas – from retirement savings, to fuel economy, to prescription drugs, to consumer credit, to food and beverage consumption – government makes personal decisions for us or helps us make what it sees as better decisions. In other words, government serves as our agent. Understood...

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...

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...

This was the first article explicitly on the theory of agency published in a regular, i.e., nonproceedings, issue of a journal in social science.The paper presents a fiduciary function model of policing in agency, with an application to attempts to influence regulatory performance by policing...

I show that it is optimal to separate non-benevolent regulators when regulated projects are large. Separation prevents regulators from coordinating to appropriate all of the agent's informational rent when they know the type of the latter; therefore, there is a trade-off between saving on...

Whether regulating mutual funds or chemical manufacturers, government's policy decisions depend on information possessed by industry. Yet it is not in any industry's interests to share information that will lead to costly regulations. So how do government regulators secure needed information...

This presents a case study of the impact of internal organization on economic regulation. The Office of Plans and Policy at the FCC is used as the subject. The interaction of organization with policy is analyzed and discussed

We study how Small Business Administration (SBA) employees respond to salient defaults. Using novel data to identify employees transferring across SBA offices, we find that defaults on SBA loans in their previous workplace reduce SBA loans in their current workplace. The effect is independent of...

During the last decade, governments have shown increasing interest in curbing the growth of regulation by requiring that one or more regulations be removed before a new regulation can be added. We provide a comprehensive review of this innovation in regulatory policy. There are three main...