Regulatory Capture

Combatting External and Internal Regulatory Capture

External and internal capture may be reduced through a more logical division of labor between Congress and agencies. In these hyper-partisan times, one is hard-pressed...

Regulators as Validators

Special interest groups can use their influence over regulation to water down not just potential legal sanctions but also potential reputational sanctions. What deters corporate...

The Elusiveness of Regulatory Capture

Regulatory capture is hard to pin down, its elusiveness stemming from four principal factors. Nearly everyone sees regulatory capture – and rightly disdains it. And...

Regulatory Capture is Not “Inevitable”

“Capture” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of economists who turn their students into sure-to-fail regulators. A Wall Street Journal editorial asserted the “inevitability” of...

Prosecuting Corporate Criminals

Prosecutions of individual corporate criminals can, in fact, be successful—and are critical for attaining justice. It is difficult to escape the inference that the Great...

Regulatory Capture, Ancient and Modern

Regulatory capture's antecedents in political thought—which date back to ancient Greece—inform the modern concept. Until recently, the term regulatory capture seemed stale, a mid-20th century...

Making it Look Like a Struggle

 For capture to be sustainable, the regulator has to find ways to be perceived as being tough on the regulated without really hurting them. The...

Preventing Regulatory Capture

When a regulation’s benefits exceed its costs, simplicity and interdisciplinary processes are essential to reducing capture. Regulatory capture arises when regulatory decisions advance private interests...

Challenges in Measuring Regulatory Capture

We as a society have failed to settle upon what we think are the measurements, the correlates, the red flags, and the warning signs...

Fighting Regulatory Capture in the 21st Century

It should come as no surprise that the movement against regulatory capture is gaining momentum at this particular moment in our nation’s history. It is...

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