This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the ‘Regulatory State' through the lens of utility regulation. The review is multidisciplinary with it bringing together the insights available from the political science, economics, legal and management science literatures. It is clear...

This paper presents a novel theory of corruption in public procurement. It considers an agency setting of contract execution where the principal is a politician who can commit to a contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing,...

Over the last 23 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required over 34,000 companies to file over 165,000 annual reports. These reports, the so-called "Form 10-Ks," contain a characterization of a company's financial performance and its risks, including the regulatory...

The internet has created challenges for regulators of financial markets unimagined over eighty years ago by drafters of the Securities and Exchange Acts. The recent explosion in internet use has provided many benefits for investors and publicly-traded companies. The Internet has been a boon to...

The Congressional Review Act permits Congress to veto proposed regulations via a join the resolution, and prohibits an agency from reissuing a rule 'in substantially the same form' as the vetoed rule. Some scholars - and officials within the agencies themselves - have understood the...

The determinants of incentive regulation are a key issue in economics. More powerful rules relax allocative distortions at the cost of lower rent extraction. Thus, they should be found where the reformer is more concerned about incentivizing investments through higher expected profits, and where...

Most federal agencies must conduct economic analysis when proposing major regulations. This paper uses a new data set scoring the quality of analysis accompanying proposed regulations in 2008 to assess whether some types of regulations receive more thorough analysis than others. Previous...

The case for regulating the Internet has not been made. Proposed rules mandating network neutrality are not in response to evidence of market failure or widespread consumer harm, could deter investment in broadband deployment, and raise First Amendment concerns. Regulatory advocates' assertions...

Most competition authorities in the world (in Europe, in particular) impose a suboptimal level of fines. In this paper two attempting explanations are proposed, based on accountability strategies and career concerns of governing bodies of these agencies. In order to compensate the distortion in...

The success of airline deregulation challenged the claims of public choice theory, which asserts that regulation serves the purposes of the regulated firms themselves. One prominent explanation for airline deregulation is that "political entrepreneurs" can, under certain circumstances, challenge...