Book description
Regulatory Breakdown: The Crisis of Confidence in U. S.
Regulation brings fresh insight and analytic rigor to what has
become one of the most contested domains of American domestic
politics. Critics from the left blame lax regulation for the housing
meltdown and financial crisis-not to mention major public health
disasters ranging from the Gulf Coast oil spill to the Upper Big
Branch Mine explosion. At the same time, critics on the right
disparage an excessively strict and costly regulatory system for
hampering economic recovery. With such polarized accounts of
regulation and its performance, the nation needs now more than ever
the kind of dispassionate, rigorous scholarship found in this book.
With chapters written by some of the nation's foremost
economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, Regulatory
Breakdown brings clarity to the heated debate over regulation by
dissecting the disparate causes of the current crisis as well as
analyzing promising solutions to what ails the U. S. regulatory
system. This volume shows policymakers, researchers, and the public
why they need to question conventional wisdom about regulation-whether
from the left or the right-and demonstrates the value of undertaking
systematic analysis before adopting policy reforms in the wake of disaster.
"Everybody talks about regulatory failure, but no one does
much about it. This book investigates claims of regulatory breakdown
in the United States and provides helpful clues as to what might be
done."-Jerry Mashaw, Yale Law School
Cary Coglianese is Edward B. Shils Professor of Law at the University
of Pennsylvania, director of the Penn Program on Regulation, and
coeditor of Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy,
also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
