Commentaries & Insights

Our Commentaries and Insights are short-form publications intended to distill long-form research and synthesize current policymaking activity into easily understood concepts.


Trump Administration Picks up the Regulatory Pace in its Second Year

The first 6 months of the Trump administration’s second year reveal a quicker pace than its first, though still slower compared to the Obama administration.

FCC Process Reform Underscores Need for Economic Review at Independent Regulatory Agencies

At a June 2018 policy seminar, Chairman O’Rielly focused his remarks on the next steps in the FCC’s process reform efforts.

DHS Proposes Raising Barriers to Foreign Entrepreneurship in the U.S.

DHS recently proposed a rule to eliminate its international entrepreneur program, and the proposed removal would have negative economic effects.

A Taxonomy of Regulatory Forms

There is a lot of interest in understanding what effects regulations have on economic growth and other macroeconomic measures, but measuring those impacts is challenging, in part because regulatory metrics themselves are rather blunt. Pages or even words in regulatory code may not tell the whole story. Intuitively, the form a regulation takes is relevant for predicting its impacts.

Spring Unified Agenda Sustains Deregulatory Focus

Targeting regulations that limit competition

GDPR: Does it matter on this side of the Atlantic?

GDPR: Does it matter on this side of the Atlantic?

Better Data Collection Would Improve Analysis of NEPA Regulations

Better data collection and reporting are key to analyzing how NEPA implementation has evolved and investigating whether the Act is achieving its goals.

Regulating Within a Budget

The Trump Administration’s regulatory budget constraint may help improve agency benefit-cost analyses.