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Government agencies have endeavored, with limited success, to improve the methodological consistency of regulatory benefit–cost analysis (BCA). This paper recommends that an independent cohort of economists, policy analysts and legal scholars take on that task. Independently established “best practices” would have four positive effects: (1) they would render BCAs more regular in form and format and, thus, more readily assessable and replicable by social scientists; (2) improved consistency might marginally reduce political opposition to BCA as a policy tool; (3) politically-motivated, inter-agency methodological disputes might be avoided; and (4) an independent set of “best practices” would provide a sound, independent basis for judicial review of agency BCAs.

The purpose of this paper is to debate on how to achieve, in countries that have invested in the North American model of the regulatory state, the greatest efficiency in creating norms for the organization of public and private activities in order to guarantee the autonomy and technical impartiality required for the proper functioning of regulatory agencies.

This paper describes the development of the legal framework regarding regulatory agencies in Brazil. The research was based on bibliographical data, media reports, and the Brazilian Supreme Court decisions.

The regulation dissemination through regulatory agencies in Brazil has given rise to a series of controversies concerning the limits of their performance and the extent of their technical discretion. According to the findings, it is concluded that these independent agencies should be guided by the following four pillars: (1) the legal rule of fixed-term in office; (2) the principle of lesser control intensity (deference) of the agency acts; (3) the prohibition of contingency of agencies’ budgetary resources; and (4) the prohibition of agency powers suppression. Otherwise, the institutional capacity of agencies will be diminished and their neutral action in technical matters will be compromised.

This paper shows how enhanced autonomy and technical impartiality can be useful for better regulatory governance in other countries, preventing them from suffering from the same problems that have occurred in Brazil.

Federal regulatory agencies are created by Congress to mitigate particular social problems, such as pollution (the Environmental Protection Agency), discrimination (the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), and anticompetitive conduct (the Federal Trade Commission). These agencies have the delegated authority to issue Rules and Regulations that have the force of law within their respective domains, constrained by the oversight of the President and Congress, and by litigation through the Courts. Many view the extent of such oversight as inefficiently lax, with the result that “missionary” bureaucracies successfully overregulate and inefficiently extend the span of their authority. After describing these concerns, I develop a model of agency bias that extends my earlier work with Canice Prendergast and Topel (1993, 1996) to a regulatory framework. In the model, activist bureaucrats who seek greater regulation are attracted to an agency's mission. Their biases are constrained by the courts, where agency rules and regulations can be challenged, and by oversight from other branches of government. In equilibrium, agencies gain from the exercise of bias even though all parties know it occurs and seek to mitigate its costs. The public sector is overregulated on average. Overregulation is largest when the social problem is least harmful, and when oversight of agency actions is weak. Stronger oversight would reduce the distortionary effect of agency biases. More precise legislative language would provide clearer guidance to the court system, which would reduce deference to biased agency opinions in the formation of regulations.

The purpose of this study is to integrate institutional theory with current research in corporate political strategy and political science to examine the relationship between organizations and regulatory agencies. It seeks to explore the limits of the power of the state to regulate organizations by comparing the historical timing of industry regulation of two different fields. It aims to examine two US regulatory agencies – the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The paper presents a longitudinal analysis of two US regulatory agencies that illustrates differences in agency responses to firm resistance. Specifically, event history analysis and maximum likelihood estimation are used to examine the impact that firms in the commercial airline and automobile industry have in the rule‐making process of the FAA and NHTSA.

Distinct differences were found between the rule‐making context of the airline and automobile industries.

The study focuses on the rule‐making context of two regulatory agencies. Examining additional agencies in future studies would help confirm the results of this study. Moreover, because the study is limited to regulatory agencies in the USA, the results may not be directly generalizable to other nations.

This study emphasizes the importance of historical context and its impact on current industry conditions, particularly in regulation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine insurance regulation theories, regulatory agency structures and measures.

This study investigates significance of regulatory agency structure, key regulatory measures, political stability and cultural dimension in insurance markets of 56 developed and developing countries for 2005‐2009.

It was found that insurance consumption is lower in countries with an authority exclusively for insurance regulation but life insurance consumption is higher when the agency is part of government or when another agency is jointly responsible for insurance regulation. Market entry regulation leads to lower consumption whereas market exit regulation has the opposite effect. Solvency regulation and required use of standard forms for insurer financials lead to greater consumption of insurance. A positive impact on the nonlife market is observed for accounting regulation and regulator's intervention power.

Price control regulation may lower consumption of insurance whereas tariff rating brings about a rise in the consumption. Regulation of insurance intermediaries or corporate governance may lower insurance consumption whereas the requirement that insurers employ an actuary or actuaries gives rise to the consumption.

The author found no difference between OECD and non‐OECD countries. However, corruption‐freeness and inflation impact insurance consumption. Using OECD country data only, a negative impact was found of the single agency structure and tariff regulation in the life insurance market and a positive impact of regulation by two or more agencies in the life insurance market and of price control regulation in the nonlife insurance market. Corruption‐freeness positively affects the loss ratio in the life insurance market and the combined ratio in the nonlife insurance market.

Many European-level networks and regulatory constellations in different sectors (e.g., energy, telecommunications) without clear anchorage into the European Union (EU) institutional landscape have been subject to increasing efforts by the EU institutions to tie them closer to the EU. They are serving increasingly as platforms for preparing EU policy or for implementing EU decisions, which may result in closer institutional bonds with the EU. This chapter aims at examining the differences and similarities between the process towards more EU-integration in two different domains (i.e., telecommunications and patents) and regulatory constellations (i.e., supranational and intergovernmental).

The chapter analyzes the evolution in the European telecommunication sector and the European Patent System and juxtaposes this analysis with the literature on institutionalization, Europeanization of regulatory network-organizations, and multilevel governance (MLG). It focuses on the role of the European Commission and the interaction with the national regulatory agencies (NRAs) and networks within the institutional framework.

Irrespective of the particular regime (intergovernmental/supranational) in a certain domain or sector, a common trend of closer coordination and integration prompted by the Commission is taking place, which triggers a certain resistance by the national bodies regulating that domain. As long as a specific competence is considered instrumental in the creation of the single market, the Commission has strong incentives to strengthen its influence in this field, even if those competences have been regulated through an independent intergovernmental regime.

The dynamic described in this chapter allows us to reflect upon the MLG conception as developed by Marks and Hooghe (2004), which distinguish between two types of MLG. Type I MLG refers to different levels of governments, more specifically to the spread of power along different governmental levels and the interactions between them. Type II MLG refers to jurisdictions that are both task-specific and based on membership that can intersect with each other. They respond to particular problems in specific policy fields (Marks & Hooghe, 2004). Our analysis shows that the increase in coordination and integration are the outcome of both MLG Type II processes (coordination between two issue-specific bodies) and of MLG Type I processes (tensions between two governmental levels). Furthermore, the negotiation dynamics regarding this increased coordination and integration reveal that the tensions typical of MLG Type I took place as a consequence of the increased coordination between Type II bodies. Put differently, multi-level coordination and integration mechanisms in the EU can be seen as both Type I and Type II processes. They combine features of both categories and reveal that their Type I and Type II features are interdependent.

The analysis in this chapter shows a need for further strengthening the MLG Type I and II conceptual framework by balancing the analytical distinction between the two types with developments about how Type I and Type II are often entangled and intertwined with each other rather than separated realities.

The chapter describes and compares the dynamics in the European telecommunications sector and the European patent system with interesting observations for NRAs and the European Commission with respect to coordination and integration.

The original nature of the current chapter relates to the two selected areas and the addition to the literature on MLG.

First, with respect to the areas investigated the dynamics of the European telecommunications sector have been analyzed also by other authors, but the European patent system is an area which is relatively unexplored in terms of governance research. The combination of the two sectors with a detailed analysis of similarities and differences is highly original and generates interesting lessons with respect to coordination and integration in supranational and intergovernmental regimes.

Second, Marks and Hooghe (2004) distinguish between the two types of MLG as if they are two different constructs that are not related to each other. Our cases and argument cover both types of MLG and show the interconnection between the dynamics taking place in the two types of MLG.

The wave of regulatory reforms in European telecoms and electricity industries has had an important impact on the structure of the state as well as of corporations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the establishment of these regulatory organizations at the state and corporate levels within a unified theoretical framework, that is grounded in the politics of regulation.

The case selection includes governance structures at the state and corporate levels in 16 European countries in both telecoms and electricity.

The data reveal that regulatory agencies exist in both telecoms and electricity sectors in all 16 countries under study, with the notable exception of Switzerland's electricity sector. At the same time, business corporate reforms were also evident, mainly via the creation of corporate regulatory offices at the headquarters of the firms. These departments, which redefine the patterns of responsibility within the corporation and have played the leading role in the negotiations with the external regulatory environment.

This paper strives to overcome the tendency in the scholarly literature to look only at one or the other aspect of the growth of regulatory development and therefore also to offer a narrow understanding of the growth of regulation. It asserts that the commonalities in the expansion of autonomous regulatory agencies and corporate regulatory departments suggest that the growth in the regulatory professionalization of the state and of business corporations reflects the changing nature of capitalist economy and society and the rise of a new global order of “regulatory capitalism”.

In this paper, the authors examine the association between the banking regulatory regime and the quality of bank earnings. We further investigate whether the banking agency regulatory characteristics moderate the association between banking regulation and earnings quality.

Using panel data spanning 29 years over the period 1991 to 2019, the authors model bank earnings quality as a function of scores for banking regulation for 170 banks in the East African region using both the feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation methods.

The results, which are robust for endogeneity among other checks, reveal a positive impact of bank regulatory mechanisms on the quality of bank earnings. The authors further establish differential impact of specific regulatory mechanisms, with some contributing positively toward earnings management while others contributing negatively toward earnings management. The differential impacts of banking regulation on earnings quality are also manifested in the country-level analyses.

First, the study utilises a mix of bank-specific, country-specific as well as economy-specific variables in one dataset. Second, the authors utilise survey-based data using the World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Surveys (BRSS) for the periods 1999 to 2019. The authors assume that the bank regulatory mechanisms in place pre-1999 are close to the mechanisms in place as per the 1999 BRSS. Given limitations in data availability, the authors are not able to control for banks engaging in multiple activities such as insurance, underwriting of securities, FinTechs, among others.

The results are useful in bridging the gap between theory and practice regarding the expected effect of strict banking regulations on the quality of earnings in Eastern African Banks. For the positive impact of banking regulation on bank earnings quality to be felt, the institutional, social and environmental specificities of the five selected countries need to be adequately developed and taken into consideration.

This study is perhaps the first to utilise a large dataset of commercial banks from countries in a developing region characterised by relatively lower enforcement and dynamism in the banking regulation. Further, in-depth studies on the association between banking regulation and earnings quality remain sparse.

This paper seeks to examine the role that regulation and regulatory agencies played in the creating of the subprime mortgage market, and the subsequent crash of the mortgage market. The paper has two goals. First, it seeks to document the degree to which the US housing markets, and the US housing finance market, were regulated prior to the crash. Second, it seeks to show that regulatory bodies set policies which created both incentives and explicit requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as depository institutions, to enter the subprime market.

The paper examines the regulatory environment of the subprime market. It uses regulatory filings and other documents as primary sources.

The popular perception that the subprime mortgage market arose because housing finance was largely unregulated is incorrect. In point of fact, the housing finance market was very heavily regulated. Indeed, the paper shows that the creation of the subprime market was a formal goal of the federal government, and that federal regulatory agencies explicitly required participation by the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).

The paper's primary implication is that incentive conflicts within the US housing finance system significantly contributed to the mortgage crisis. These incentive conflicts were not just within private firms, but also extend to the GSEs and regulatory agencies. Regulatory agencies not only failed to anticipate the crisis; they actively encouraged the policies which created it. As a result, the primary focus of reform efforts should be on identifying and eliminating such conflicts.