Testimony of Rena Steinzor…before the U.S. House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Environment and Economics. 112th Congress, 1st Session (2011).

Environmental regulations have saved millions of lives, preventing chronic respiratory illness and heart attacks in cities across the country. These rules protect children from irreversible neurological damage, save billions of dollars in cleanup costs, and preserve water quality in lakes, rivers, and streams. If anything, our regulatory system is dangerously weak, and Congress should focus on reviving it rather than eroding public protections…

Regulatory Barriers to Women in Business

Reducing gender inequality in the workplace is one of the most widely discussed global challenges. This paper inves-tigates empirically the impact of regulations on female participation in the private sector using panel data for a large sample of countries. The metrics examined include female ownership of businesses and female share of employment in non-agricultural sectors of the economy. The findings indicate that regulatory constraints tend to place a dispropor-tionate burden on women and shed new light on the interconnections between business regulations, firm creation, and women in the workforce.The views expressed by this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Na-tional Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. The research was supported by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation

Campaign Finance: An Introduction to the Field

This is a review of the economics and politics of campaign finance regulation and of the econometrics of the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes.Campaign finance; incumbent advantage; industrial organisation of election campaigns

An Assessment of Cross-National Regulatory Burden Comparisons

The Article compares several rankings systems for national regulatory compliance costs. It finds the ranking systems are limited to differentiating between those countries least burdened by regulation from those most burdened by regulation. It concludes the rankings could be an important tool for deciding which countries would be the most promising for regulatory burden reduction initiatives

An Assessment of Cross-National Regulatory Burden Comparisons

The Article compares several rankings systems for national regulatory compliance costs. It finds the ranking systems are limited to differentiating between those countries least burdened by regulation from those most burdened by regulation. It concludes the rankings could be an important tool for deciding which countries would be the most promising for regulatory burden reduction initiatives

The Obama Administration's Regulatory Review Initiative: A 21st Century Federal Regulatory Initiative?

On January 18, 2011, President Obama signed Executive Order 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review, which instructs federal regulators to do the following: coordinate their agencies activities to simplify and harmonize rules that may be overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant; determine whether the present and future benefits of a proposed regulation justify its potential costs (including taking into account both quantitative and qualitative factors); increase participation of industry, experts, and the public (“stakeholders”) in the formal rule‐making process; encourage the use of warnings, default rules, disclosure requirements, and provisions of information to the public as an alternative to traditional “command‐and‐control” rule‐making restricting consumer choice; and mandate a government‐wide review of all existing administrative rules to remove outdated regulations. Executive Order 13563 includes a qualitative “values” provision to be considered in the required cost–benefit analysis, which can potentially counteract the alleged regulatory reform rationale of President Obama. Furthermore, in Executive Order 13563, President Obama established a deadline of May 18, 2011, for all executive branch agencies to submit their plans to streamline their rulemaking operations and repeal those “overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant” rules. These two issues, along with complementary regulatory review proposals being discussed in the U.S. Congress, are evaluated in this essay.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91369/1/j.1467-8594.2012.00404.x.pd

The cyclical trend of local public service governance: evidence from urban water management in Spain

The level of public and private involvement in economic activity in societies has changed over time. One may talk about the existence of a cyclical trend in which the most important periods of public governance are replaced by periods in which private management dominates the situation. This phenomenon may also be observed in local areas. Some authors have pointed out the existence of an alternation in the provision of municipal services, resulting in periods dominated by governance compared to other stages dominated by private management. In order to illustrate this cyclical trend at local level, this paper intends to analyze the evolution of the governance of the Spanish water supply since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Recent evidence from the industry suggests the possibility that we may currently be witnessing a further change in the trend.: Local Government, urban water supply, privatization, municipalization

The Unbearable Lightness of Regulatory Costs

The Article counters the presumption that increased environmental regulation necessarily decreases economic prosperity. It analyzes the European chemical regulatory structure and deduces that any costs imposed on the consumer are minimal, and more cost effective than watered-down American regulations covering the same subject matter with approximately the same cost imposed on the consumer-taxpayer. It argues the Office of Management and Budget and regulated industries have consistently overestimated the costs of environmental regulation and promoted the theory that environmental regulation causes factories and jobs to move offshore. It concludes that deregulation may not spur growth

Economic Freedom and The Business Cycle: The Egyptian Experience.

Most studies that emphasize and encourage the shift towards a less regulated and financially open system rest on the premise of a prosperous growth prospect. Accordingly, interests have focused on growth models as a framework to understand and to analyze the effects of economic freedom. In this paper, we investigate the short-run characteristics of economic freedom. Using a stochastic general equilibrium framework, we argue that economic reforms tend to ease periods of recessions, increase welfare, and alleviate the burden of unemployment. Calibrated to the Egyptian economy, we simulate our model and investigate the [robust] relationship between economic reforms and the business cycle.Economic Freedom, Washington Consensus, Business Cycle, Egypt.