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Reducing special-interest influence over government regulation
When regulated industries exert undue influence on (or “capture”) their governmental regulators, problems that are all too familiar may result. And while scholars have investigated regulatory capture, deregulation has been the most typical, and often the only, remedy prescribed—an approach that may lead to problems of its own.
David A. Moss, the John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration, has helped lead a team of scholars from across the country to examine how to mitigate or prevent regulatory capture by looking at the conditions under which regulation succeeds or fails in practice. He and his collaborators focus on the importance of empirical analysis to assess degrees of influence.
“The more we understand the nature of special-interest influence over regulation, the more we should be able to devise a spectrum of remedies to reduce the scope of regulatory capture—remedies including, but not limited to, deregulation,” write Moss and his coauthor Daniel Carpenter, the Freed Professor of Government at Harvard University.
In fact, the evidence suggests that strong or pervasive types of regulatory capture—the most damaging varieties—are quite rare. In the majority of situations, capture is less extreme and may potentially be limited or even resolved through targeted policy reforms.
(Published October 2014)
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