As much as environmental problems manifest themselves as problems with the natural environment, environmental problems — and their solutions — are ultimately social and behavioral in nature. Just as the natural sciences provide a basis for understanding the need for environmental policy and...

President Donald Trump and members of his Administration repeatedly asserted that they had delivered substantial deregulation that fueled positive trends in the U.S. economy prior to the COVID pandemic. Drawing on an original analysis of data on federal regulation from across the Trump...

Regulation is a high-stakes enterprise marked by tremendous challenges and relentless public pressure. Regulators are expected to protect the public from harms associated with economic activity and technological change without unduly impeding economic growth or efficiency. Regulators today also...

Numerous corporate scandals in the past several years have fueled widespread debate over proposals for government action. The central challenge for government is how to restore corporate integrity and market confidence without overreacting and stifling the dynamism that underlies a strong...

For too long, environmental policymaking has relied on trial and error, without adequate or systematic learning from either the trials or the errors. Systematic program evaluation research has been remarkably scarce relative to the overall number of environmental policies adopted in the United...

We examine a rapidly emerging regulatory approach that we label "management-based regulation." Management-based regulation shifts the locus of policy discretion from the government regulator to the regulated entity. Government directs private firms to incorporate public goals into their...

Administrative law scholars and governmental reformers argue that advances in information technology will greatly expand public participation in regulatory policymaking. They claim that e-rulemaking, or the application of new technology to administrative rulemaking, promises to transform a...

Regulators need to rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but over-reliance on science can actually contribute to, or at least deflect attention from, incoherent policymaking. In this article, we explore the problems with using science to...