Journal Articles & Working Papers

These documents are the apex of the Center's academic research.  Our working papers are authored with the intention of publishing them in peer-reviewed journals at a later date, and our journal articles are setting the standard in their academic disciplines.


The Role of Transparency in Regulatory Governance

This article examines the transparency of procedures in the US and the EU related to impact analysis and public comment. It examines the importance of transparency for ensuring the effectiveness of these two regulatory practices, summarizes regulatory procedures in the US and the EU, compares the different approaches, and highlights the relative merits of each.

Structuring Regulators

Regulatory organizations can be structured in different ways, and choices about their organizational structure can impact regulators’ behavior and performance, both overall as well as at the level of individual employees. This paper analyzes structural decisions about regulatory organizations along two dimensions: vertical structure and horizontal structure.

State Funeral Regulations: Inside the Black Box

This study estimates the effects of state regulations affecting funeral markets. It accounts for multiple major categories of regulations and demand inducement as well as direct price effects. While concurring with prior studies that find ready-to-embalm regulations increase funeral costs and decrease the percentage of cremations, this study finds that several other state regulations are associated with significantly higher receipts per death.

Point/Counterpoint: Valuing Internalities in Regulatory Impact Analysis

In this Point/Counterpoint series of 4 articles in the new issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, Brian Mannix & Susan Dudley engage in a back-and-forth with Hunt Allcott & Cass Sunstein on the advisability of regulatory interventions based solely on "internalities," which Allcott & Sunstein define as "costs we impose on ourselves by taking actions that are not in our own best interest."

The Limits of Irrationality as a Rationale for Regulation

James Madison was speaking of the structural checks on governmental power when he wrote those words, but it is worth recalling his advice when we contemplate the role of benefit-cost analysis as a check on the unconstrained exercise of the government's regulatory powers, and the implications of the reality that people's behavior, both in and out of government, sometimes falls short of what we might incorporate into an economic model or hope for in a perfect world.