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As of late 2020, the Trump administration had initiated almost one hundred rollbacks of U.S. environmental regulations. A careful assessment of the benefits and costs of rolling back an existing regulation can and should inform such decisions. When assessing the potential rollback of an existing regulation, analysts can often learn from the regulation’s implementation through retrospective analysis as well as from advances in scientific knowledge. We discuss recent actions concerning the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) to illustrate the potential lessons from doing so. In the case of MATS, advances in science have shed light on broader exposure pathways and previously unquantified health effects, suggesting that the benefits of reducing mercury emissions may exceed previous estimates. At the same time, changes in the energy sector have altered the mix of fuels used to produce electricity, which impacts both the benefits and costs of the regulation.

Deregulation is a widely suggested strategy to make agricultural markets efficient. In this article, we critically examine the recent reforms undertaken in India aiming to deregulate agricultural markets. Our analysis is from the perspective of the potential of market reforms to benefit farmers. Relying on primary and secondary data for analysis, we draw three conclusions: (1) While reforms to agricultural marketing in the country are long overdue, the new farm laws in their current form are unlikely to result in any radical changes to majority farmers. (2) The provisions of the laws, when implemented, will weigh in favour of traders. This goes against the basic tenets of the introduction of the laws. (3) Even the regulated markets can generate favourable outcomes for farmers if farmer-oriented entities play dominant roles in them. We argue that deregulation in the absence of enabling pre-conditions are unlikely to generate favourable outcomes for farmers. Instead, they may even turn counterproductive.

The energy and power industry has seen significant growth across different countries because of increased demand for consumption and market conditions including deregulation. However, due to high level of complexities and uncertainties associated with a power plant’s operations, the management must tackle with risks that may negatively impact business’s overall growth and performance. In this regard, managing non-technical potential risks is as important as handling technical ones because non-technical risks may result in hindrances in the supply process of the power plant. In this paper, a risk management approach, Fuzzy Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, has been used to identify potential non-technical risks linked to a power station’s operations that should be dealt with high priority. This technique is an advanced approach of classical Failure Mode and Effect Analysis which incorporates a fuzzy system to reduce the chances of errors; and helps the management to avoid costly damages by timely responding to the potential risks and taking appropriate corrective actions

The prime minister established a Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform (‘TIGRR’) in February 2021. Led by MPs Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa Villiers and George Freeman, its remit was to ‘to scope out and propose options for how the UK can take advantage of our newfound regulatory freedoms to deliver these aims, as well as challenging the Government’s own emerging proposals’. The TIGGR received submissions from, or met, with more than 150 organisations and individuals. The IEA is publishing three of those contributions in this collection: the IEA’s own submission, drafted by Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs, and those of Sir Mark Boleat and Jon Moynihan OBE, two distinguished commentators who gave their personal view. The TIGGR published its report and recommendations on 16 June 2021. Its findings are wide-ranging and ambitious, and reflect some of the recommendations made by our authors. We are publishing this collection to inform the discussion about the TIGRR report and regulatory reform in general. The report and the three submissions illustrate the scale of the challenge to achieve the prime minister’s objectives of driving innovation, reducing barriers to entry and improving the regulatory environment for small businesses. They also show that there are myriad opportunities to make progress towards them. Sir Mark reflects on the structural reasons for the present regulatory burden, the need to address regulator accountability and the tendency of incumbent business, far from seeking deregulation, to favour ever greater regulation as a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Jon Moynihan reflects on the differences between common and civil law traditions, and the UK’s regulatory culture and incentives. He puts forward some key areas such as health care and financial services, where reforms could transform innovation and competitiveness. Victoria Hewson puts forward three examples of current regulations that could be reformed, one concerning industrial goods, one concerning digital services and one concerning employment law, and considered the benefits and trade offs that might result.

This study investigates firms’ reporting choices and ensuing capital market effects in response to the gradual deregulation of quarterly reporting in the prime market segment of the Vienna Stock Exchange (VSE). First, in November 2015, the VSE abandoned the mandate to prepare quarterly reports in compliance with International Accounting Standard (IAS) 34 Interim Financial Reporting. We observe that half of the prime market firms stop IAS 34 compliance until 2018, but do not experience any adverse effects on their stock liquidity. Second, in February 2019, the VSE completely terminated the quarterly reporting mandate. Only a few firms abandon quarterly reporting, but about half of firms reduce the scope (i.e., the content) of quarterly reports to varying degrees. We find that firms that terminate or reduce the scope of quarterly reporting the most, experience a significant decrease in stock liquidity. Taken together, our findings suggest that firms carefully trade off the economic benefits of discretionary presentation format, lower reporting frequency and scope against associated economic costs in the form of reduced liquidity.

When deciding whether to introduce market competition into a regulated industry, a regulator faces an important tradeoff. Market-based prices can provide incentives to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce costs, but the presence of market power may lead to increased markups. We use a detailed dataset on electricity transactions to investigate the impact of market-based deregulation in the context of the U.S. electricity sector. We find that the increase in markups dominates despite modest efficiency gains, leading to higher consumer prices. Deregulation does not necessarily reduce prices and improve consumer welfare. Thus, regulated prices may be preferred to market-based prices when firms are capable of exerting market power.

We study the magnitude and nature of racial disparities in the U.S. small business credit market. Exploiting a unique dataset containing rich loan contract information, including firm and lender characteristics, we document sizable racial differentials in small business lending, measured by loan denial rates and interest rates between black-owned businesses and otherwise observationally identical white-owned businesses. Such racial disparities are most pronounced in areas associated with severe racial bias against blacks. Critically, we show that an exogenous increase in bank competition due to bank deregulation has a quantitatively large effect in reducing racial disparities in small business lending, and such a reduction is primarily driven by entrant banks, as the Becker (1957) theory of racial prejudice predicts.

This Article makes the case that pharmaceutical companies, along with other powerful corporate actors in the pharmaceutical industry, are in effect designing their own markets, often at the expense of, rather than in pursuit of, public health. The influence exerted by these corporate actors extends beyond traditional forms of regulatory capture, rising to what this Article refers to as pharmaceutical capture—a concept that encompasses the exercise of holistic and systemic control over the operation of pharmaceutical markets and their regulation. After developing a framework for thinking about pharmaceutical capture, this Article uses the evolution of the opioid epidemic as a case study of capture at work. It argues that the patterns of corporate influence highlighted in the case study are not unique to opioids, but rather are structural features of U.S. pharmaceutical markets. A popular political response to concerns about the power exerted by corporate actors in the pharmaceutical industry has been to pin the blame on government regulation as impeding the discipline of the “free market.” But pharmaceutical markets rely on government regulations to function, and this push for deregulation is in many cases simply an effort to substitute one governance structure for another more favorable to incumbent corporate interests. This Article concludes that it is not deregulation, but rather a redesign of regulation, that is needed to improve the public health impact of the pharmaceutical industry. Drawing lessons from pharmaceutical capture, it suggests guidelines for a regulatory recapture.

On 13 August 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promulgated its final rule amending the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for the Oil and Natural Gas Sector. Both adherents and detractors of President Donald J. Trump saw the new rule as contributing to the President’s deregulatory agenda, taking an important step toward American dominance in fossil fuels (desirable or not), and winning yet another battle in the war on the environmental protection legacy of President Barack Obama. This simple story line is compelling, but when the details are examined, it is found that the changes were in some ways more important, and in other ways less important than advertised by supporters and opponents. Moreover, some of the changes have damaged positions Trump championed, while others have the potential to substantially improve the environmental performance of the oil and gas industry. Most importantly, some major sources of methane emissions have been inadequately dealt with across both administrations. Therefore the Biden administration EPA, in re-examining NSPS, should take care to discard the mistakes made by the Trump administration, retain the improvements, and move forward on a number of new fronts. Topics explored include redundancy of methane and volatile organic compound leak detection, regulation of older and low production facilities, abandoned wells, pneumatic controllers, oil storage tanks, routine flaring, malfunctioning and unlit flares, gathering pipelines, and EPA certification of new methane emission detection technology.

The majority of U.S. households that qualify for federal rental housing assistance do not receive it. In the absence of an entitlement to housing assistance for all who qualify, an underexplored cause of the shortfall is that higher rents in some areas driven by supply-constraining local regulations drive up program costs, leaving fewer funds available to serve additional families. In this paper, we first show that because the federal government bears the full cost of any incremental increase in market rents in assisted housing units, stringent local regulations can substantially increase the federal cost of covering a fixed number of families. We then simulate the effect of deregulation that reduces home prices to the cost of producing a home in 11 substantially supply-constrained metropolitan areas, which we translate into reduced market rents and ultimately cost savings for federal rental housing assistance programs. We estimate that post-deregulation, the Housing Choice Voucher program and Section 8 Project-based assistance program could save a combined $3.9 billion, which could serve 13 percent (424,000) more families.

Russian Abstract: Статья посвящена анализу реакции авиакомпаний-конкурентов на вход нового игрока на рынок. Данная проблема является актуальной в свете дискуссий вокруг методов стимулирования конкуренции на рынках пассажирских авиаперевозок. Решение назревших проблем в сфере гражданских авиаперевозок применительно к вопросам конкуренции требует переформатирования подходов отраслевой и антимонопольной политики. Перед регулятором стоит вопрос соблюдения баланса интересов авиакомпаний, поставщиков аэропортовых услуг и конечных потребителей – пассажиров. При этом необходимо определить направление реформирования – дерегулирование или государственное субсидирование. Данное исследование представляет собой попытку систематизации конкурентных стратегий, выбираемых авиаперевозчиками в ответ на изменение условий конкуренции. Результаты анализа могут иметь интерес с точки зрения построения прогнозов поведения авиакомпаний на разных маршрутах (рынках) при дерегулировании отрасли и увеличении числа конкурентов. English Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of the reaction of competing airlines to the entry of a new player into the market. This problem is relevant in the light of discussions around methods to stimulate competition in the passenger air transportation markets. Decision urgent problems in the field of civil air transportation in relation to competition issues require reformatting of approaches to industry and antitrust policies. The regulator is faced with the question of balancing the interests of airlines, airport service providers and end-users - passengers. In this case, it is necessary to determine the direction of reform - deregulation or state subsidies. This study is an attempt to systematize the competitive strategies chosen by air carriers in response to changing competition conditions. The results of the analysis may be of interest from the point of view of building forecasts of airline behavior on different routes (markets) with deregulation of the industry and an increase in the number of competitors.

Lockdown measures enacted across the US due to the Covid-19 pandemic have severely curtailed personal and economic liberty. Although a growing body of research estimates the benefits and costs of these restrictive measures, significantly less research examines the role of deregulation in expanding healthcare capacity. This paper examines the impact of the FDA and CDC's deregulation on Covid-19 testing. I find laboratories and test developers greatly expanded Covid-19 testing availability and expanded the variety of tests after deregulation occurred. My findings provide critical and timely implications for research in public health and pandemic response policy more broadly.

Arizona’s position as a leader in economic freedom has made it one of the United States’ most business-friendly states, resulting in a relatively sustained economic boom over the last 30 years. Post-recession success is at least partially due to the state’s deregulation and pro-technology development policies. Unfortunately, technology development in Arizona and across the country is often still stunted by a complicated, laborious web of federal regulations. Federal and state leaders can work cooperatively to lower regulatory barriers to innovation and supercharge the economy. Current Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s administration has done an admirable job of encouraging legislation that addresses both these needs. One notable example is the Regulatory Sandbox—a pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-competition program aimed at attracting increased out-of-state investment and high-paying technology jobs. The Sandbox enables an approved business limited access to the Arizona consumer market to test innovative FinTech and RegTech products and services without first having to obtain otherwise applicable authorizations to operate, such as a business license. This program promises to be an unparalleled opportunity for Arizona to help secure the state’s technological and financial future, while strengthening consumer safeguards and economic liberty. However, for the benefits of sandbox-like programs to be fully realized, federal agencies will need to participate in regulatory coordination with state agencies. This will require federal agencies to exercise their exemptive authority, to ensure Sandbox participants are not burdened by federal regulations that are redundant of exempted state regulations. If such coordination is achieved, innovation should truly flourish. This article describes how the Sandbox works, the reasons for its creation, why regulatory coordination is imperative to unlocking the Sandbox’s full innovation-generating potential, and the ways in which federal agencies can exercise their exemptive authority to facilitate this increased innovation and economic growth.

An outdated statutory framework and legacy regulations in the United States have created a labyrinth that constrains the Federal Communications Commission from adequately responding to the impending disappearance of traditional voice telephony. This outdated telephone service is not even a shadow of its former self: the number of telephone lines in 2018 was the same as in 1950, despite the U.S. population more than doubling and the total number of voice-capable telecom connections exploding 700 percent over the same period. Yet this waning service remains under an intricate regulatory system involving federal and state authorities. There is but one way out of the labyrinth – comprehensive deregulation that immunizes against regulatory temptations – allowing the remaining service providers and their customers to manage the transition to a fully broadband world. Efforts to deregulate piecemeal are well intentioned and can help in certain contexts, but could also trip over legacy structures, resulting in worse outcomes for users and providers of traditional voice services.

We develop a two-sector growth model of vertical structure in which the upstream sector features Cournot competition and produces intermediate goods that are used in the downstream sector for the production of final goods. In such a vertical structure, we show that deregulation and increased market competition in the upstream sector does not only increase its own productivity, but also has a substantial spill-over effect on the productivity of the downstream sector through affecting factor prices. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy and use the calibrated model to quantitatively evaluate the extent to which deregulation in the upstream market in China from 1998 to 2007 accounts for the rapid economic growth over the same period. Our quantitative experiments suggest that deregulation in the upstream market in China from 1998 to 2007 can account for a significant fraction of China’s economic growth during this period partly due to the significant spillover effect it has on the downstream sector. In addition, our model can also match several relevant observations in China during the same period including high and rising returns to capital, declining markups.

Despite federal law, twelve American states and Washington D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana since 2012. Using a national housing data set from the online real estate listing database Zillow.com, we identify the cross and inter-state effects of marijuana legalization on house prices in different points of the price distribution function. We find positive effects upwards of ten percent in the top half of the price distribution following successful legalization ballot initiatives, and between five and fifteen percent across the distribution after the state enacts the ballot initiative and the first legal sales take place. A spatial difference-in-differences model reveals that within Colorado and Washington, prices in neighborhoods with new dispensary openings nearby experience a seven percent price appreciation. To summarize, our results suggest that there are second order benefits to marijuana legalization.

Demand has rapidly outstripped supply as the urgent need for personal protective equipment (PPE) such as surgical masks, respirators, gloves, and gowns, as well

This article examines the downstream sector of the Nigerian oil and gas sector has in recent times, it has being operating at crossroads. With the huge amount of money spent by the Federal Government of Nigeria on subsidizing petroleum products into the country is causing economic dislocation. In remedying this malady, this article examines the policy of the government on total deregulation of the downstream sector from the law and economic perspective. Deregulation is a process of allowing the market forces to be the major determinant of petroleum prices. Law and economics otherwise known as the economic analysis of law is best viewed as a social tool that promotes economic efficiency. This article evaluates the economic efficiency of deregulation in light of existing laws and proposed laws coupled with recent social events. This article reveals arguments for and against deregulation but concludes that the adverse effect of deregulation is not ad infinitum but will bring about self-sufficiency and economic buoyancy.

Public school leaders might be more likely to support private school voucher programs if they are enacted alongside public school deregulations. We use a survey experiment to examine the effects of public school deregulations on actual public school leaders’ support for a hypothetical private school voucher program in California. We do not find evidence to suggest that public school deregulations affect public school leaders’ support for private school vouchers overall. However, we unexpectedly find that deregulations related to teacher certification and administration of standardized tests further decrease support for private school choice for leaders of large public schools. This unexpected result may be explained by expected adjustment costs or regulatory capture.

The importance of services inputs in enhancing manufacturing productivity and competitiveness has been well documented in the literature on global value chains and economic development. In this context, we investigate the nature and strength of the interlinkage between the services and manufacturing sectors in India and China, using value-added and exports data from the OECD Trade-in-Value-Added Database over 2005-15. Three principal observations emerge from our analysis. First, manufacturing value-added in exports is significantly overstated in conventional BOP statistics for both countries; it is much lower when we use the value-added approach. Second, China’s services value-added contribution is concentrated in traditional services such as trade and distribution and transport services, reflecting the high demand from its competitive manufacturing sector. In contrast, services exports and value-added in India display a higher utilization of modern services, notably, information technology (IT). Third, in both the countries, services show potential for raising their value-added contribution to manufacturing exports, particularly in high-value sectors like IT services. The analysis suggests a need for further deregulation, liberalization, and diversification of the service sector along with greater policy recognition of the importance of services for spurring manufacturing as well as overall competitiveness.

The aviation industry doubles market size every 15 years. This growth is partly determined by changes in government regulations. The present chapter describes how the privatization and deregulation of airline markets has contributed to this development. First, we describe the historic development of the airlines’ regulatory environments and ownerships across countries, regions, and continents. Areas including the United States, the European Union, China, India, the countries of Africa and the South East Asian Nations serve as the representative markets and are discussed in more detail. It is shown that deregulation in the air transport market has become a mainstreamdevelopment, and that deregulation has changed aviation markets in many positive ways. Deregulation generally led to stronger competition, reduced fares, increased flight frequencies, more connections, and increased passenger numbers. But deregulation is still far from completion, which illustrates the potential for further improvements of aviation markets. Second, we briefly describe the airlines’ privatization development around the world. Many studies showed that public airline ownership can be associated with major financial losses, while private ownership can help to avoid such losses by improving efficiency and increasing revenues. However, a large share of today’s airlines is still completely or partly government owned.

This paper/chapter, presented at the Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2018), attempts to identify the key evolving trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement for 2018 and beyond. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement, grant, and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity. This year's paper discusses, among other things, the high degree of uncertainty currently being experienced in the public procurement sphere, dramatic increases to the micro-purchase and simplified acquisition thresholds, the work of the Congressionally-mandated Section 809 and 813 Panels, the proliferation (and new guidance related to) other transactions (OT’s) and experimental authorities,the concerning state of the defense industrial base and critical under-investment in infrastructure, the Defense Acquisition University's new Adaptive Acquisition Framework and Contracting Cone, human capital and the acquisition workforce, available data for assessing the performance of the acquisition system, the leadership vacuum at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), the concept of "Agile BS," and other potential trends.

In the 1980s, six former southern republics of the USSR (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), like other former Soviet republics, traded very intensively both between themselves and with the other Soviet republics, but had a meagre volume of trade with the rest of the world. After the transition to the market, the deregulation of foreign trade, and the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, trade between the former Soviet republics shrank dramatically and was only partially replaced by trade with other countries, mostly from Western Europe. In the 2000s and 2010s, the relative importance of trade with Western Europe has declined and the share of trade with China and other Asian countries has grown. This paper compares changes in the geographical structure of trade of both former Soviet republics (Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan) and Turkey, with the predictions of the gravity model. The gravity model suggests that trade between two countries is proportionate to their respective GDPs and is inversely related to the geographical distance between them.2 Turkey serves as a yardstick for comparison. For Turkey, changes in its geographical trade structure resulted from a rise in the proportion of trade with Asian countries and a decline in the proportion of trade with other regions in the world economy. In contrast, for the former Soviet republics there was an additional reason for changes in their geographical trade structure: the collapse of trade within the former USSR.

This paper examines the effect of short selling on corporate tax avoidance. We propose a financial constraint view, that short selling triggers corporate insiders’ incentive to avoid taxes for funding investment opportunities in emerging markets. Employing staggered short-sale deregulation on the Chinese stock market as quasi-exogenous shocks, we find that the deregulation of short-sales reduces firms’ cash effective tax rates and effective tax rates by 11.8% and 21.1%, respectively. This effect is especially prominent for financially constrained firms and non-state-owned firms. We further show that short-sale deregulation indeed increases the cost of equity capital of Chinese listed firms. These results suggest that tax avoidance helps to generate additional funds and mitigates financial constraints under downward price pressure in emerging markets that have strong government intervention and lax law enforcement.

A new method of financing known as equity crowdfunding, propelled by internet technology and deregulation, has emerged rapidly as a promising new source of startup financing and a window into early-stage investment process. By studying companies raising funds on one of the largest US equity crowdfunding platforms, this study finds that companies with multiple founders with prior personal financial commitment (“Skin in the Game” (SITG)) raise more funds, suggesting a signaling mechanism to investors of founders’ cross-validation of the project’s prospects. Single founders lack such mechanism. The study uncovers a link between the team structure, a key organizational aspect, and signaling to future stakeholders. The same mechanism may be at work in other contexts, such as venture capital syndication and mutual fund management decisions. In addition, the work offers insights into the potential of crowdfunding.

In 2015, the FCC issued its most sweeping order protecting net neutrality. Fast forward to today’s environment in which the FCC rolled back most net neutrality protections for consumers and producers of content on the Internet. The essence of such deregulation is that Internet service providers can discriminate among Internet users, allowing prioritization (for a price) in the transmission of their data. In this paper, we address different “discrimination” policies (regulatory regimes) to determine how they could affect nonprofits. We expect this research to inform nonprofits, policymakers, and consumers about technology and media policy for nonprofit organizations in the future.

We show that firms with more short-term institutional investors have better long-term performance in dynamic economic environments. Following exogenous increases in competitive pressure due to large cuts of import tariff rates, firms with more short-term investors achieve higher growth rates of sales and employees in comparison to other firms in the industries affected by the tariff cuts. To do so, these firms invest more in fixed assets, R&D, and advertising, and differentiate their products from those of the competitors. Firms with more short-term investors also conduct more diversifying acquisitions and have higher executive turnover in the aftermath of large tariff cuts, suggesting that they put stronger effort in adapting their business to the new competitive environment. These results are not specific to tariff cuts but also robust to increases in competitive pressure due to deregulation shocks. Our findings suggest that firms with more short-horizon investors adapt more promptly to changing economic environments and highlight a potential benefit of short-horizon investors.

Deregulation of major industries over the past 40 years has produced large efficiency gains. However, distributional effects have been more difficult to assess. In the electricity sector, deregulation has vastly increased information available to market participants through the formation of wholesale markets. We test whether upstream suppliers, specifically railroads that transport coal from mines to power plants, use this information to capture economic rents that would otherwise accrue to electricity generators. We find railroads charge higher markups when rents are larger. This effect is larger for deregulated plants, highlighting an important distributional impact of deregulation. (JEL L11, L51, Q48)

Based on the ongoing disclosure overload debate, this paper investigates how deregulation-driven decreases in quarterly disclosure affect information asymmetry. We exploit a German setting in which the minimum content requirements for quarterly reporting have been reduced for firms listed in the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE). This deregulation allows Prime Standard companies to choose whether to continue to publish full quarterly financial reports or to switch to so-called quarterly statements to meet their quarterly reporting obligations. Compared to full quarterly reports, the latter have significantly lower minimum content requirements. Based on a difference-in-differences research design, our results provide empirical evidence that decreases in quarterly disclosure come along with statistically and economically significant increases in information asymmetry. However, we find that this effect is particularly driven by smaller firms, which operate in weaker information environments. Additionally, our results confirm that this information asymmetry effect is associated with the extent of actual decreases in (specific content-related types of) quarterly disclosure.

The United States central government enactment of the 1866 Post Roads Act preempted state and municipal telegraph franchise entry barriers. Like present-day telecommunication companies, local franchise regulations were an entry barrier to United States telegraph companies. These pre-1866 state and municipal telegraph laws were barriers of both entry and trade between states. Trade barriers reduced the benefits of a common market and undermined market-preserving federalism (Weingast 1995). I document what laws were preempted by the 1866 Post Roads Act, explain how these laws increased entry barriers, provide evidence that preemption was enforced, and uses two counterfactuals to calculate rough estimates of the decrease in entry costs from enforcement of the act.

Financial regulatory policy in the U.S. has been conspicuously pro-cyclical over the last two decades. The 2000s financial boom coincided with a period of financial deregulation and the post-crisis response, a massive scaling up of regulation, was largely implemented during an economic downturn. Many argued that these regulatory waves were excessive. More recently, there are strong signs of a move toward deregulation, at a time of a booming economy and stock market. A closer look at historical financial boom-bust cycles suggests that, in fact, pro-cyclicality in financial regulation is a common and recurring pattern. This paper combines a signaling model of elections with a simple financial regulation model to study how public opinion, financial innovation, and policy-makers incentives shape financial regulation. While changes in voters' perceptions of financial innovation alone can generate a pro-cyclical pattern, we show that this cyclicality can be significantly amplified by politicians' electoral incentives: Both over-regulation and under-regulation can naturally arise in equilibrium, and small changes in public opinion can induce large regulatory shifts.

The diversity of regulatory structure between countries provides opportunities to compare government’s role and performance in different settings. This study presents such an analysis, looking at telecommunications regulation in Denmark and the United States. We show that Denmark is a leader in telecom services both in Europe and around globe; however, whereas the United States has the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Denmark lacks such a centralized, proscriptive, omnipresent regulator. We find several specific ways in which US policymakers could benefit by learning from Denmark and we recommend moving toward a more politically cooperative, market-led, and technology-neutral framework.

This paper reviews the operations of the oil downstream sector in Ghana by appraising the industry report for 2016. It identifies some challenges of the sector and proffer solutions to ameliorate them. Among the recommendations include the payment of BDC debt by government and OMCs to create enough fiscal space to enhance their operations.

Forces like globalization, deregulation, convergence of technology and evolution of success have shaped the international markets extensively and made a large number of product and service choices readily available to the consumer across boundaries. However, with these forces coming into play, an average consumer is not satisfied with the consumption of the products offered to him. Today, Consumers are more aware and actively search for information to make more informed purchase decisions. Web 2.0 has revolutionized consumer interaction with available products and services and lead to consumer empowerment. With Consumer empowerment, comes the contemporary view of the value creation process; consumers are no longer passive members of a value creation process, they participate proactively with the company to create value. Consumer Co-creation has transformed today’s market from a firm-centric perspective to a consumer-centric perspective, where the consumer has evolved as a competence. Customer Co-creation has become the driving reason for success, our research delves into exemplars to display the impact Customer Co-creation has on the company.

This investigation uses a unique data base that combines government effectiveness and regulatory quality indices from the World Development Indicators, to represent deregulation towards more market-driven incentives in renewable energy dissemination and production, and how such efforts are triggered by new regulatory change. We use panel data analysis and control for the dynamics of solar-pv and wind output in a set of 34 developed and developing countries. The panel data analysis reveals a strong and significant effect for both wind and recent solar-pv efforts to increase their presence in most of the countries analyzed, although with some asymmetries. Positive government effectiveness and regulatory quality explain the dynamics. We test for robustness also with data from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, on market concentration of incumbent utilities.

Private and public sector banks are rigorously competing with one another to face the challenge and also equipping their employees to successfully transform themselves, a process started in the nineties in the banking sector. The economies have been profoundly affected across the globe because of the forceful effect of globalization and deregulation. Training and Skill development therefore is of utmost importance, as in the banking sector it strengthens the organization on one hand by helping it in realizing objectives, vision and dreams, and on the other hand helps the employees in performing better. This synergistic approach helps in meeting out the most critical factor in an organization "Employee Engagement" which is considered to be the key measure for organizational performance in the twenty first century. Training and Skill development thus plays a key role in addressing the issues of talent retention and performance enhancement by making the employees visualize the gap between what they are currently and what status they could attain by bridging this gap through training programs. An organization can thus achieve high levels of business success by having a Workforce which is highly engaged and possesses knowledge, necessary skills and expertise.

Publicly listed firms respond to capital supply conditions shaped by local investing preferences. Public firms headquartered in areas with higher proportions of senior citizens and women use more debt financing. These demographics are associated with conservative investing, leading to a higher and more stable local supply of debt capital. The demographics-leverage relation is more pronounced for firms that cannot easily tap public bond markets, which is the majority of public firms. Changes in firms’ financing activities around exogenous shocks to credit supplies – including interstate banking deregulation and the 2008-2009 financial crisis – support the local capital supply hypothesis.

This paper, presented at the West Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2016), attempts to identify the key trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement for 2017. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement, grant, and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity (which, this year, was highlighted by the (unexpected) inauguration of the Trump administration). The paper discusses, in addition to data, changes to OFPP and DoD leadership and the likely conclusion of the Defense Department Better Buying Power Initiative, and other potential trends.

We investigate the stock market’s reaction to events leading up to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) 2007 regulatory changes that reduced the scope of and documentation requirements for assessments of firms’ internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR), as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The stated goal of these regulations was to reduce firms’ and auditors’ compliance costs with mandatory ICFR assessments, while maintaining the effectiveness of these assessments. We examine abnormal returns surrounding key dates leading to the passage of these regulations and offer two main findings. First, investors reacted negatively on key event dates, suggesting that investors viewed the regulations as likely to reduce financial reporting quality rather than to drive firm and audit efficiencies. Second, this negative market reaction is larger when ICFR effectiveness should matter most – when firms are more complex, have higher litigation risk, and greater fraud risk. In additional analysis, we find that restatements increase in the post-regulation time period, consistent with investors’ concerns that the effect of the legislation would be a reduction in ICFR effectiveness. Overall, our results may imply that investors prefer stronger government regulation when it comes to the assessments of a firm’s internal controls over financial reporting.

This paper investigates the heterogeneous effects of finance on firm exports through the lens of differential exporting modes. China’s WTO accession leads to an export deregulation, which empowers private domestic firms with low registered capital to export directly. This quasi-natural experiment encourages firms switching from indirect to direct exporting, and thus providing an ideal setting to explore the heterogeneous effects of finance on exports for switchers and non-switchers. Applying the difference-in-differences (DID) approach to a comprehensive survey data on Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that finance improves exports more for firms switching from indirect to direct exporting, relative to continuous indirect exporters. Moreover, we show that the heterogeneous effects of finance on exports for switchers and non-switchers are more pronounced in the post-WTO accession period. The time-varying heterogeneous impacts suggest an economic loss caused by the export distortion before China’s WTO accession because it prevents productive but financially constrained private domestic firms from direct exporting.

On 27th October 1986 the 'Big Bang' led to a revolutionary change in the City of London's financial markets. These changes were led by the sudden deregulation of existing financial markets. This article will by analogy seek to argue that in the same vein as the 1986 Big Bang, January 2018 will precipitate a new '2018 Big Bang' in the banking, financial services, and insurance sectors across the European Union (EU). It will demonstrate the inherent difficulties that the banking system is currently facing in the EU, and will also delineate the complex, challenging, and costly existing regulatory compliance frameworks that banks, financial services firms, and insurance firms are facing today. In addition, it will seek to highlight a range of new and highly complex, challenging, and costly regulatory compliance frameworks that are set to take effect from January 2018 in the EU. It will be argued that this combination of economical circumstances, combined with overregulation throughout the EU, will lead to the next phase in the evolution of the EU's new, more robust, and more innovative financial landscape.

The study looks at the impact of price of petroleum prices on inflation in the Ghanaian economy in the pre and post deregulation era and associated direction of causality as well as the extent of pass through of high international petroleum products price to the domestic retail market. An ARDL model was applied on time series monthly data of various petroleum fuel prices as well as exchange rate. A pass-through formula use by Baig et al, (2007) was also applied. The results reveal that changes in LPG, Kerosene and premium prices have marginal impact on inflation. The pass through analysis revealed Ghana has not pass through more than 50% of increase price of international or import petroleum product of gasoline, kerosene and LPG to the ordinary consumers in the period of the study and this was lower in the post deregulation than pre deregulation. The study therefore recommends full deregulation to continue since it favours lower pass through of fuel price increase in the world market to ordinary consumers whiles may consider gasoline and premium price increase at the expense of kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas price if inflation is to be shielded from fuel price increase.

Empirical support for the purported benefits of retail electric deregulation is mixed at best. Prior studies that identify states as simply “retail deregulated” overlook complex policy environments in which deregulation is implemented by regulators with a high degree of discretion. Prior studies also rely on Energy Information Administration data that do not account for core regulatory interventions that can take place during the process of implementing deregulation. Using robust time series household final bill survey data from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, this article provides a quasi-experimental analysis of the price impacts of retail electric restructuring in Ohio. The results suggest that residential electricity prices have increased following retail restructuring in all service territories in Ohio, with significant favourable welfare effects observed only in the Cincinnati area, where key policy implementation stages were not circumvented.

The severity of impact of crude oil price shocks on the macro economy of an oil importing country are thought to be moderated by regulating domestic prices of petroleum products. India has adopted a deregulated regime of pricing of bulk purchases of diesel in January 2013 moving away from a controlled and subsidised pricing system. This paper investigates how this change has affected (A) the influence of crude price changes in determining diesel prices in India using an ARDL framework and (B) the severity of impact of international crude oil price changes on the macro economy of India using a SVAR framework. Based on monthly data between 2004 April and 2017 February, we find that in the post deregulation phase (1) diesel prices are influenced by crude oil prices much more than before; (2) the intensity of impact of crude oil price changes on inflation has increased; (3) the response of monetary policy to crude oil price changes have become statistically insignificant. We also find that the impact of crude price changes on output has always been insignificant.

This paper investigates the competitive conditions and revenues drivers of commercial banks in MENA region in the context of Panzar-Rosse model. It is the first study of its kind that examines a large sample of MENA banks for an extensive period (1999-2012) during an era of political and economic unrest and transformation that includes the 2007 global crisis, providing the ability to draw reliable conclusions. We find that MENA banks operate under monopolistic competition. Our findings indicate that policies that favoured relaxing capital adequacy requirements, decreasing state role and mergers are not empirically justified for MENA banks during this period.

Electricity price forecasting has become a crucial element for both private and public decision-making. This importance has been growing since the wave of deregulation and liberalization of energy sector worldwide late 1990s. Given these facts, this paper tries to come up with a precise and flexible forecasting model for the wholesale electricity price at the Italian market on an hourly basis. We utilize artificial intelligence models such as neural networks and bagged regression trees that are rarely used to forecast electricity prices. After model calibration, our final model is bagged regression trees with exogenous variables. The selected model outperformed neural network and bagged regression with single price used in this paper, it also outperformed other statistical and non-statistical models used in other studies. As a policy implication, this model might be used by energy traders, transmission system operators and energy regulators for an enhanced decision-making process.

Analysis of recent updates to the Russian privatization legislation in 2015 allows saying that the 2015 amendments as a whole aim to boost the process of privatization. The suggested enhancements for the information system of privatization of government-owned and municipal property and for the mechanism of selling such property are intended to render the entire privatization process more transparent while counteracting occurrences of corruption and criminality. It has not gone unnoticed that the practice of narrowing the scope of the privatization legislation continues. Since the legislation came into force late in 2001, the number of property categories whose disposal goes beyond the scope of the provisions thereof has nearly doubled (to 20 from 11), some of which have been given a broader interpretation. The next few years will show what kind of effect the potential of the foregoing amendments has on the effectiveness of this process, bearing in mind the contribution to meeting the federal budget deficit and generating budget revenues at other levels of public authority.

The never ending story of the abuse of cable market power in the multichannel video programming distribution (MVPD) and the broadband Internet access service (BIAS) markets involves the central themes of communications policy over the past fifty years. Public policy must create the conditions for competition and entry. However, the economic characteristics of communications networks make it extremely difficult for workable competition to grow and inevitably lead to the abuse of market power, if regulation is too light or deregulation is premature. Cable TV needed policies like local franchises and guaranteed access to programming under the compulsory license §111 of the 1976 Copyrights Act to get off the ground. Cable quickly became the dominant video transmission and Congress twice deregulated cable long before competition existed. Cable abused its market power to raise consumer prices and prevent entry of new video distribution systems, like head-to-head (intramodal) competition from overbuilders and intermodal competition from new technologies like satellite (intermodal competition). Today, cable operators and broadcasters team up to vigorously resist the entry of Internet-based competition and consumers still suffer from the billions of dollars of overcharges as a result. Internet-based cable operators like Filmon, who are the best hope for competition, qualify for the same compulsory license that wireline cable operators have used for four decades.

Two years after the deregulation of the German interurban bus industry in January 2013, two new entrants emerged as market leaders: MeinFernbus (MFB) and FlixBus (FB). We use a comprehensive route-level data set to investigate the determinants of route entry for both providers. Applying survival models, we find that both companies show an increased probability to enter populous, centrally located routes with large shares of young inhabitants; however, they both avoid entries into routes including an airport or with low quality rail connection. Furthermore, both market leaders refrain from entering small and medium-sized routes in which another provider is already operating. In large markets, however, they both show an increased entry probability independent of the presence of a competitor.

In the last 25 years, there has been a significant, global renovation of telecommunications regulation as countries around the world have opened telecommunications markets to competition. This present regulatory era can be described as “Regulation 3.0.” This is the world after monopoly regulation (Regulation 1.0) and market opening measures including privatization, liberalization and interconnection and unbundling (Regulation 2.0). This paper asks what “Enforcement 3.0” should look like in an Internet world, with less regulation, less market power, and more of a focus on investment and innovation. In an Internet economy, business models, services and technologies are evolving quickly and in unforeseen ways and governing rules may be unclear, new or non-existent. In such an environment, dialogue with the regulator will be an essential feature of the new enforcement paradigm. John Braithwaite is well known for his articulation of a restorative justice “enforcement pyramid.” Variations of the enforcement pyramid have been implemented in practice by sophisticated regulators around the world, including within the context of telecommunications. A key to restorative justice is dialogue between regulators and industry. In this paper we argue that there is a gap in the literature between the development of restorative justice dialogue and the institutional framework which must accompany such dialogue. We attempt to contribute to the shaping of Enforcement 3.0 by drawing a link between restorative justice pyramids and the institutional frameworks and practices that will best permit and promote positive dialogue with regulators.