A new approach to environmental policy advocated by state agencies and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is to create “tracks” of environmental performance. The philosophy behind performance track programs is simple: distinguish strong environmental performers from weak ones and...

Regulation aims to improve the performance of individual and organizational behavior in ways that reduce social harms, whether by improving industry's environmental performance, increasing the safety of transportation systems, or reducing workplace risk. With this in mind, the phrase...

Researchers who evaluate ordinary dispute resolution procedures understandably ask whether disputants are eventually satisfied with the resulting outcomes. But how should they evaluate techniques for involving the public in regulatory policymaking, i.e., techniques such as comment solicitation,...

Regulatory agencies such as the Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and Internal Revenue Service face significant information demands in crafting the thousands of new regulations the federal government issues each year. Before adopting new regulations, regulatory...

Regulatory policy has long been a source of controversy, eliciting criticism and calls for reform from virtually all quarters. In recent years, reform proposals have typically sought to restructure the institutional environment of regulatory policymaking by changing administrative law and...

Regulators must rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but science by itself cannot justify public policy decisions. We review the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to justify recent changes to its National Ambient Air Quality Standards...

In recent years, regulatory agencies, Congress, and the White House have taken steps to increase the use of information technology in the management of the rulemaking process. The latest such “e-rulemaking” effort is the design of a new, government-wide regulatory information system being...

The spate of recent corporate scandals has produced a legislative and regulatory reaction aimed at restoring marketplace integrity. This response – consisting notably of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, implementing regulations and stock market listing standards – has, in turn, affected...

For too long, environmental policymaking has relied on trial and error, without adequate or systematic learning from either the trials or the errors. Systematic program evaluation research has been remarkably scarce relative to the overall number of environmental policies adopted in the United...

We examine a rapidly emerging regulatory approach that we label "management-based regulation." Management-based regulation shifts the locus of policy discretion from the government regulator to the regulated entity. Government directs private firms to incorporate public goals into their...