The Regulatory Component of Health Care Reform

Explains the rationales and goals of regulatory intervention. Assesses the likelihood that proposed changes to regulations will be implemented as a component of healthcare reform or that they will help control costs and improve efficiency

The Economics of Scholarly Publications and the Information Superhighway

This article examines the basic economics of scholarly publications, especially technical journals, and applies this model to the consequences of low-cost electronic publication. The article discusses the demand for scholarly publication: dissemination of new information to students, other researchers and professional users outside the educational community; reputation development by scholars and research institutions; and the evaluation of research personnel by peerds and superiors. The key supply feature of scholarely publication is that some uses are public goods, and others have strong economies of scale. Electronic publication reduces duplication and storage costs, but does not have much of an effect on fixed costs, and so is a minor technological change purely from the perspective of costs. However, electronic publication is a major change in two respects: it radically alters the relative costs of enhancements to straight textual material, and so may change the content of publications, and it dramatically reduces the cost of unauthorized duplication. The article focuses on the latter problem, and explores some of its possible consequences.

URBAN CONCENTRATION: PROSPECTS AND IMPLICATIONS

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The Economic Significance of Executive Order 13422

In January 2007, President Bush issued an Executive Order changing the procedures for undertaking benefit-cost analyses of proposed regulations. These changes have been hailed by some as dramatic improvements while criticized by others as representing the politicization of the evaluation process. This essay analyzes the major provisions of the new Executive Order, and concludes that it is unlikely to have much of an impact on the number or quality of regulations. Only one provision, subjecting major "guidelines" documents to mandatory benefit-cost analysis, potentially could be important, but even here there is no systematic evidence that agencies have used guidance documents to change the stringency of regulations and thereby to bypass the mandatory regulatory review for regulations. Moreover, the Executive Order leaves untouched the primary weaknesses of benefit-cost analysis as practiced by government agencies, such as the absence of standardization of values for key parameters, the use of inappropriate alternative regulations for comparison with a proposed regulation, and the general lack of either peer review or ex post re-evaluation of regulatory impact studies.

The Feasibility of Marketable Emissions Permits in the United States

Economists have long advocated the use of economic incentives, rather than detailed regulations, as a means for combatting environmental pollution. In the late 1970s, environmental regulators in the United States began experimenting with one such method—emissions permits that, within important limits, can be traded among sources of pollution. This paper explores the feasibility of an extreme version of the marketable permits approach, one in which all source-specific regulations are replaced with tradable emissions permits. First, the general argument for a marketable permits system is presented, including a discussion of the legal procedures that are required by each of the major alternative methods for effecting improvements in environmental quality. Then, the implementation problems of a permits market are explored. Because this is partly an empirical problem, this analysis is presented in the context of an example: particulate sulfates in the Los Angeles atmosphere. Finally, some specific design possibilities are presented, and compared to the early experiments with tradable permits

The Future of Telecommunications Regulation

Ten years of procompetitive regulation at the Federal Communications Commission and the pending divestiture of AT&T to settle the decade-old government antitrust case against the company have sown the seeds for a fundamental restructuring of the telecommunications industry. Competition, though as yet vigorous only for a handful of services and devices, is nevertheless healthy and growing. The salient regulatory questions are the extent to which the industry can become competitive, the rate at which the AT&T monopoly will erode, and how regulation can ease and speed the transition to a more efficient industry structure. The purpose of this paper is to lay out the role of the FCC during the next decade or two as the industry becomes increasingly competitive but AT&T continues to have a dominant position in long distance telephone and certain key elements of the equipment market