This paper examines the use of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model in chemical and radiation exposure. The LNT model assumes that exposure to any level of a chemical or radiation is harmful, down to even the last molecule. Used primarily to be “public health protective,” the model has been...

This article provides a novel theoretical basis for a regulatory budget and compares the theory of regulatory budgeting with the implementation of these programs in U.S. states and the federal government during the Trump administration. The first half of the article is devoted to explaining how...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the many deep inadequacies of the regulatory system of the government of the United States. Nearly every day brings news about red tape being rolled back because it has hampered efforts to test for COVID-19,1 to treat patients in need of medical care, or to...

Previous research speculates that some regulations are counterproductive in the sense that they increase (rather than decrease) mortality risk. However, few empirical studies have measured the extent to which this phenomenon holds across the regulatory system as a whole. Using a novel US state...

Government regulation is a double-edged sword. By restricting the inputs—capital, labor, technology, and more—that can be used in the production process, regulation shapes the economy and, by extension, living standards today and in the future. Applied effectively, regulation can foster a...

This paper updates the cost-per-life-saved cutoff, which is a cost-effectiveness threshold for life- saving regulations, whereby regulations costing more per life saved than this threshold level are expected to increase mortality risk on net. Two competing methods of deriving the cutoff exist: a...

In May 2014, the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy published a series of papers as part of a multiauthor collaboration organized by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. That series of papers, together with a forthcoming article by Hester Peirce, reviews ways in which U.S. federal...

In the past 70 or 80 years, there have been three “waves” of reforms to the process of creating and managing U.S. federal and state regulations. The first wave began in 1946 with the passage of the federal Administrative Procedure Act, after which states went on to pass and formalize their...

A common way of imposing fiscal discipline in private companies, as well as in some governments, is a practice called zero-based budgeting (ZBB). The idea behind ZBB is simple: require that all expenditures be justified anew each period. There is no assumption that spending set at a particular...

One of the most urgent challenges facing policymakers managing the current COVID-19 public health crisis is how to ramp up diagnostic testing on a mass scale. Companies such as Walgreens, CVS, and Target have already started working with the federal government, as their locations are well-suited...