In the past two decades, the thesis of the quot;rise of the regulatory state in Europequot; has been widely discussed in the literature because of changes in the role of the State that have recently occurred. On the one hand, the State retreats from sectors such as utilities, where it was highly...

Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” (1971) is a landmark in the economics of regulation. It used simple public choice reasoning to set out the “capture theory” of regulation whereby “… as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated...

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 article is a first attempt to investigate Chinese bureaucratic politics in-depth in order to analyze how these dynamics affect the outcome of antitrust enforcement in China. It has two major findings. First, bureaucratic politics have a powerful impact on the allocation of economic...

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...

In this paper we review some recent work on public intervention in economic environments where firms undertake investments in research or in physical assets, and then select appropriate business practices to extract profits from the outcomes of the investment process. Public policies may take...

Private certification as a means of risk regulation and quality assurance offers advantages over government regulation, including superior technical expertise, better inspection and monitoring of regulated entities, increased responsiveness to consumers, and greater efficiency. This article...

The United States Patent Office was poised to implement a new set of regulatory rules on November 1, 2007, that would have had considerable impact upon the use of continuation applications in patent prosecution. As the proposed Final Rules were struck down by the court in Tafas v. Dudas as...