This paper examines lobbying and corruption as alternative ways of dealing with regulatory obstacles. I propose a model where firms facing a costly regulation can bribe a rule-enforcing bureaucrat to get around it, lobby the government to reduce its impact, or do both. I then use a firm-level...

The United States is experiencing a shortage of large-truck drivers. Such a shortage might normally be attributed to a failure in the market for driver services. Instead, this article argues that the trucker shortage is an example of government failure, wherein government regulations fail to...

We assembled a large panel of project-level technical and financial data as well as country-level economic, institutional, political, and governance variables to assess the determinants of private financing of infrastructure in emerging markets and developing economies. Controlling for economic...

Elected leaders delegate rulemaking to federal agencies, then seek to influence rulemaking via top-down directives and statutory deadlines. This paper documents an unintended consequence of these control strategies: they reduce regulatory agencies’ ability and incentive to conduct high-quality...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This paper employs the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card scoring system to compare the quality and use of regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) for...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Our previous reviews found that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. This paper finds that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or regulatory...

This paper examines the impact of user fees on the speed of new drug review and on the responsiveness of FDA reviewers to pharmaceutical firms. User fees are expected to alter FDA behavior and responsiveness to pharmaceutical firms because they give regulators a financial incentive to process...

The European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) encompasses perhaps the most monumental pan-European regulation in the last decade and may well become a de facto world standard. The regulation is described as a means to regulate the processing of personal data, the...

Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, on public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental...