When the Hazard Is Human: Irrationality, Inequity, and Unintended Consequences in Federal Regulation of Contagion

This Article will take a critical look at OSHA and the CDC, which together constitute the federal system responsible for prospective regulation of the risk of contagion in institutional settings. In particular, this Article will argue that OSHA\u27s recent inclusion in this regulatory system is highly problematic given the uneasy fit between the substantive and procedural provisions of the Act, geared as they are toward regulating hazardous things, and the task of regulating contagion arising from human beings. This Article will demonstrate that substantive and procedural provisions designed to regulate non-human phenomena by balancing two sets of rights, cannot be superimposed on a problem that requires the regulation of human beings and the balancing of multiple sets of rights without generating a panoply of theoretical distortions, regulatory irrationalities, and unintended consequences. The first section will provide an overview of the federal system for regulating contagion, and will describe and analyze the rulemaking process and the content of existing CDC and OSHA regulations. The second and third sections will examine the substantive and procedural provisions of the Act and the culture of OSHA, which together constrain the agency\u27s ability to develop effective and equitable workplace contagion regulations. Finally, the last section will suggest how to reduce irrationality and inequity through reallocating authority to regulate contagion in institutions among the CDC, OSHA, and state public health officials and through OSHA\u27s adherence to certain substantive principles and implementation of a number of procedural changes for regulation in this field

When the Hazard Is Human: Irrationality, Inequity, and Unintended Consequences in Federal Regulation of Contagion

This Article will take a critical look at OSHA and the CDC, which together constitute the federal system responsible for prospective regulation of the risk of contagion in institutional settings. In particular, this Article will argue that OSHA\u27s recent inclusion in this regulatory system is highly problematic given the uneasy fit between the substantive and procedural provisions of the Act, geared as they are toward regulating hazardous things, and the task of regulating contagion arising from human beings. This Article will demonstrate that substantive and procedural provisions designed to regulate non-human phenomena by balancing two sets of rights, cannot be superimposed on a problem that requires the regulation of human beings and the balancing of multiple sets of rights without generating a panoply of theoretical distortions, regulatory irrationalities, and unintended consequences. The first section will provide an overview of the federal system for regulating contagion, and will describe and analyze the rulemaking process and the content of existing CDC and OSHA regulations. The second and third sections will examine the substantive and procedural provisions of the Act and the culture of OSHA, which together constrain the agency\u27s ability to develop effective and equitable workplace contagion regulations. Finally, the last section will suggest how to reduce irrationality and inequity through reallocating authority to regulate contagion in institutions among the CDC, OSHA, and state public health officials and through OSHA\u27s adherence to certain substantive principles and implementation of a number of procedural changes for regulation in this field

Estimating economic and social welfare impacts of pension reform

This paper examines the impact of two effects of the pension reform package that the UK Government put forward in the May White Paper Security in retirement: the likely increase in the number of older people working due to a higher State Pension age and the likely rise in saving due to more people putting away money for retirement. The overall effect of changes to State Pension age and the introduction of personal accounts on UK incomes is likely to be in the range of 0.9 – 3.1 per cent. Although these numbers are relatively small proportions of the total economy, they represent significant sums. In terms of today’s economy, they would be worth around £11 – 38 billion. This paper also applies an innovative economic analysis to examine the scale of the increase in people’s wellbeing as a result of improved consumption smoothing. It finds that if people save for retirement through personal accounts, then generally their wellbeing will be enhanced.pension reform; consumption smoothing; social welfare

High scale impact in alignment and decoupling in two-Higgs doublet models

The two-Higgs doublet model (2HDM) provides an excellent benchmark to study physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). In this work we discuss how the behaviour of the model at high energy scales causes it to have a scalar with properties very similar to those of the SM -- which means the 2HDM can be seen to naturally favor a decoupling or alignment limit. For a type II 2HDM, we show that requiring the model to be theoretically valid up to a scale of 1 TeV, by studying the renormalization group equations (RGE) of the parameters of the model, causes a significant reduction in the allowed magnitude of the quartic couplings. This, combined with $B$-physics bounds, forces the model to be naturally decoupled. As a consequence, any non-decoupling limits in type II, like the wrong-sign scenario, are excluded. On the contrary, even with the very constraining limits for the Higgs couplings from the LHC, the type I model can deviate substantially from alignment. An RGE analysis similar to that made for type II shows, however, that requiring a single scalar to be heavier than about 500 GeV would be sufficient for the model to be decoupled. Finally, we show that not only a 2HDM where the lightest of the CP-even scalars is the 125 GeV one does not require new physics to be stable up to the Planck scale but this is also true when the heavy CP-even Higgs is the 125 GeV and the theory has no decoupling limit for the type I model.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figure