This paper assesses the quality and use of regulatory analysis for economically significant regulations produced by federal agencies in 2008. A nine-member research team used a six-point (0-5) scale to evaluate regulatory analyses according to criteria drawn from Executive Order 12866 on...

In the wake of Granholm v. Heald, numerous states passed new laws to regulate interstate direct shipment of alcohol that would seem to contradict the spirit, if not the explicit content, of the Commerce Clause. We build on existing scholarship analyzing the empirical impacts of direct shipment...

This paper examines the various statutory standards that require agencies to conduct some form of economic analysis and explores which standards correlate with more rigorous judicial review when a rule is challenged in court and with more rigorous regulatory analysis by the agency preparing the...

Until 2004, Federal Communications Commission regulations required that incumbent local telephone companies must lease to competitors the entire platform of network elements necessary to provide local phone service. In December 2004, the FCC decided to phase out the unbundled network element...

Instead of allowing financial markets to own the price and quotation data they produce, the SEC forces the markets to contribute the data to a central pool, in return for sharing in the revenues from the sale of the data. Even within this system of attenuated property rights, the SEC could...

Regulatory agencies often produce mediocre economic analysis to inform their decisions about major regulations. For this reason, Congress is considering proposals that would require regulatory agencies to conduct regulatory impact analysis and subject it to judicial review. For judicial review...

Americans expect federal regulation to accomplish many important things, such as protecting the country from financial fraudsters, preventing workplace injuries, preserving clean air, and deterring terrorist attacks. Regulation also requires tradeoffs—there is no such thing as a free lunch....

Today, individual U.S. retail investors have virtually limitless opportunities to invest their money, with a notable exception: they cannot directly invest in securities of foreign issuers and still be protected under U.S. law. This missing opportunity deprives U.S. investors of the ability to...

Several D.C. Circuit decisions that remanded regulations to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) between 2005 and 2011 provide a natural experiment that permits researchers to identify the correlation between judicial review and the quality of regulatory agencies' economic analysis and...