From: Social Science Research Network
Jennifer Nou, University of Chicago – Law School
Edward Stiglitz, Cornell University – Law School
From: GW Columbian College of Arts & Sciences | Regulatory Studies Center
by D. Pérez, S. Dudley, N. Eisner, R. Lutter, D. Zorn and N. Nord
Unnecessary regulatory differences between countries persist as lingering barriers to trade even as traditional barriers are declining.
From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
While this is a time of great political uncertainty in the United States, the next President has a promising opportunity to advance dramatically what has been called the cost-benefit state. A little more than five years ago, in a case called Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper, the Supreme Court embraced as “eminently reasonable” the principles for cost-benefit balancing advanced by every president since at least Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. Against the backdrop of this established administrative practice, the Court reversed a longstanding presumption against cost-benefit balancing, unless it was clearly permitted in the statute, to reading statutory silences or ambiguities as allowing this type of rational regulation.
Editor’s Note: The Data Quality Act applies to agency guidance documents, memoranda and other information disseminations. The DQA was enacted to prevent agency use of the internet as a backdoor Federal Register. See here.
From: Daily Caller
Kathryn Watson, Reporter
Federal agencies are increasingly using informal guidance documents, memoranda and blog posts to create rules and skirt the formal regulatory process, and Congress must stop them, a new Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) white paper finds.
The federal government has no complete survey on the use of what CEI calls “regulatory dark matter.” The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) only reviewed 14 out of “thousands” of documents created by federal officials in 2014, CEI said.
From: American Action Forum
Sam Batkins
In its series tracking regulation in the final year of the Obama Administration, this month evidenced more of the same: little evidence of a rush in regulation, but steady stream of significant rulemaking. Last month, the White House approved 15 economically significant rulemakings (economic impact of $100 million or more). This month, that figure dropped to 10, but it was still more than any comparable March during a presidential election year since 1996. Through the first three months of this year, regulators have approved 31 significant rulemakings; the two next closest years were 2008 and 2004, when regulators approved just 22 significant rulemakings. In other words, the White House has approved 40 percent more significant regulatory action than any comparable period since 1996.
From: Mercatus Center | George Mason University
Before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Government Operations
Richard Williams
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The Growing Imbalance between OIRA and Other Federal Agencies
Editor’s Note: The most crucial regulatory reform is a Regulatory Budget.
From: Mercatus Center | George Mason University
Information, investment and innovation are the engines of economic growth in the 21st century. Yet regulatory accumulation and outdated regulatory processes are preventing both the private and public sectors from effectively using the three “I’s” to solve problems and grow the economy.
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From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
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To examine the value of professional investment advice, Professor Wilkinson-Ryan, Kristin, and I recently conducted a study of retail investor retirement decision-making. Our study simulated the process by which an ordinary employee selects among the options in a typical 401(k) plan. We asked subjects to allocate a $10,000 investment among ten investment alternatives based on real-world options, with the goal of maximizing the value of that retirement portfolio at the end of thirty years. We then used an algorithm to simulate the performance of the subjects’ portfolios at the end of thirty years. Using subjects from Amazon Mechanical Turk—an online platform that enables researchers to recruit and pay subjects for performing tasks such as responding to questionnaires or surveys—we sought to determine the financial literacy of ordinary retail investors and to ascertain the relationship between financial literacy and investment performance.
Editor’s Note: The importance of centrally and independently reviewed cost-benefit analyses is increasingly recognized as an essential tool of the modern administrative state. Translation courtesy of Bing Translate. The original French text is available here.
From: La Tribune
By
A referendum does not assess the public interest of an infrastructure project. Thomas Perroud (Professor of Public Law, University of Aix Marseille) and Nicolas Treich (Toulouse School of Economics, INRA)
From: The Hill | Contributors
By Stuart Shapiro, contributor
All politicians like to claim that their preferred policies are backed by “sound science” or “good analysis.” The fact that they do this so often, and that politicians on opposite sides of an issue make these claims, increases public cynicism. The public justifiably doubts both the claim that a policy is backed by good analysis and, eventually, the worthiness of policy analysis itself. Recent debates on the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, included competing claims about the impacts of approval of the pipeline on both the environment and on the number of jobs created.
