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...

When Congress passes legislation that mandates prescriptive regulations, legislators are under no obligation to understand the problem they are trying to solve, assess alternative solutions, or understand the benefits and costs of their choices. Passage of the positive train control mandate in...

To the modern corporate scholar and lawyer, the internal affairs doctrine seems in the natural order of things. Corporate law is state law. Each corporation is formed under the law of its chosen state of incorporation. To ensure consistency and predictability, that law must govern the...

The determinants of incentive regulation are an important issue in economics. More powerful rules relax allocative distortions at the cost of lower rent extraction. Hence, they should be found where the reformer is more concerned with stimulating investments by granting higher expected profits,...

Regulation plays a key part in public service reforms. However, corruption and the risk of capture may undermine the purposes of these reforms. Both cost and incentive based regulations carry corruption and capture risks. This document shows that capture is a minor problem compared with market...

Corporate actors differ from individuals in one important respect: technically, it may be possible to observe the formation of the corporate will from outside, and to impact on its formation. This feature can be exploited by regulators. One technology is inducing corporate actors to hire an...

This paper builds on Faure-Grimaud and Martimort's [Economics Letters 71 (2001) 75-82] analysis of intermediated contracting. I argue that intermediated contracting permits one form of auditing, in which the sub-contract offered to the firm is examined, contingent on the intermediary's report....

Regulations can create economic rents for incumbents at the expense of new entrants, thereby limiting entrepreneurship and exacerbating income inequality. Cross-country studies have shown that higher costs to starting a business tends to slow new firm formation (Chambers and Muenmo 2019) and...

A regulator hires an auditor to inspect a firm. Audits serve two purposes: to detect violations and to motivate the firm to invest in compliance. Auditor and firm can collude to hide violations. Honest audits require sufficient monetary incentives for the auditor, and more frequent audits call...

This paper presents a case study of a voluntary environmental program initiated by the U.S. EPA in the late 1990's, the Strategic Goals Program (SGP). This program was intended to create incentives for job shop metal finishers, an industry of small and medium sized enterprises, to improve and...