Other PPR Events
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 12:00 - 1:15 pm | Silverman 245A
Careers in Administrative and Regulatory Law
Jonathan J. Rusch
U.S. Department of Justice
Ken Hurwitz
Haynes and Boone
Friday, March 30, 2012 12:00 pm | Faculty Lounge
Transaction Cost Regulation
Pablo T. Spiller
Visiting Professor of Law, Columbia University
Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Business & Technology, University of California, Berkeley
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MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2011 4:30-6:00 pm, Faculty Lounge, 144 Silverman Hall
Book Symposium Networks in Telecommunications: Economics and Law
Herbert Hovenkamp, Ben and Dorothy Willie Professor of Law and History, University of Iowa
Howard Shelanski, Professor of Law, Georgetown University
Hon. Stephen F. Williams, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Christopher S. Yoo, John H. Chestnut Professor of Law; Professor of Communication; Professor of Computer & Information Science; Director, Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition; co-author (with Daniel Spulber) of Networks in Telecommunications: Economics and Law.
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The recently published book, Networks in Telecommunications: Economics and Law, co-authored by University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Christopher Yoo, will be celebrated in a special symposium featuring commentaries by three of the nation’s leading jurists of telecommunications law. This new book reorients its readers to fundamental issues of regulatory policy by offering an integrated framework for understanding the economics and law of networks. Its analysis goes beyond the “network externalities” approach that has heretofore focused primarily on the size of networks, highlighting in addition the effects of network architecture and the tradeoffs inherent in network design. The symposium will begin with reflections on the book by Professor Howard Hovenkamp of the University of Iowa, Professor Howard Shelanski of Georgetown University, and Judge Stephen Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and will be followed by a response by Professor Yoo and open discussion with the audience.
Co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2011 12:00 pm, Rare Book Room, Tanenbaum 253 (inside Biddle Law Library)
China's Regulatory State
Penn Law School
Research Seminar with Prof. Roselyn Hsueh (Temple University)
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Professor Hsueh will discuss her new book, China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011). Today, China is governed by a new economic model that marks a radical break from the Mao and Deng eras. The new China departs fundamentally from that of the East Asian developmental state and its Communist past. But it is not a liberal economic model. How can China retain elements of a statist economic model when it has liberalized foreign direct investment more than any other major developing country in recent years? How can it retain state control over critical sectors and meet commitments made in its accession to the World Trade Organization? What does this mode of economic integration reveal about China’s state capacity and development strategy? In this seminar, Professor Hsueh will address these questions, arguing that China has complemented liberalization at the economy-wide level with selective reregulation at the sectoral level. This mode of economic integration contrasts with the manifestly different approaches to globalization found in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Professor Hsueh’s presentation will be followed by commentary on her book by Professor Yuhua Wang of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Political Science.
Co-Sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s East Asia Law Review
MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2011 12:00-1:15 pm, Rare Book Room, Tanenbaum 253 (inside Biddle Law Library)
Subversion or Coordination? Examining the Role of Regulatory Agency Design in the Gulf Oil Disaster
Chris Carrigan, Fellow, Penn Program on Regulation
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Download Abstract [PDF]
Details: As the agency responsible for oil and gas revenue collection as well as offshore development and regulation prior to the disastrous Gulf oil spill in 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) provides for many observers a textbook illustration of how mixing incompatible goals can lead regulators to neglect their regulatory responsibilities. In this seminar, PPR Fellow Chris Carrigan will use the case of the MMS to evaluate the claim that its role as tax collector restricted its ability to regulate offshore drilling. His analysis reveals that even when the goals associated with regulatory and non-regulatory functions do appear to clash, the achievement of legitimate governmental objectives sometimes requires extensive coordination that justifies combining regulatory and non-regulatory tasks in a single agency. As the operations of MMS's tax collection and offshore management divisions illustrate, agencies can be structured to mitigate the impact of conflicting purposes, but these measures can come at the expense of achieving advantages from the synchronization of multiple tasks. In contrast to the social science literature which has often focused attention on the dysfunctional aspects of assigning multiple policy tasks to agencies, Carrigan uses the case of MMS to reveal how even functions associated with conflicting goals can be assigned to a single agency for valid reasons.
September 15-16, 2011
Regulatory Breakdown? The Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Regulation
Policy Impact Workshop
Details: Critics on the political left and the right rail against what they perceive as regulation’s deficiencies, blaming the US regulatory system for all sorts of social and economic ills. In addition to the housing meltdown and financial crisis, various public health and environmental scares over the last two years have been widely attributed to regulatory failures: the Gulf Coast oil spill, the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, the San Bruno natural gas pipeline explosion, salmonella contamination in eggs, and concerns about sudden acceleration and other defects in automobiles. Those who blame regulation for these recent problems tend to fault its laxity, while others believe that an excessively strict and unreasonably costly regulatory system is hampering investment and job growth as the US struggles toward economic recovery.
Which of these critics are right - if any are? Do the recent public health scares and business disasters reveal a fundamental weakness in the U.S. regulatory system? Or are some failures inevitable even in the best possible regulatory schemes? How much of the sluggish economic recovery can be blamed on regulation?
Perhaps now more than ever, the nation could benefit from rigorous, empirically informed responses to these and related questions. Already Congress and Executive Branch officials have adopted major policy reforms, but policymakers of both parties still continue to call for further reforms in the US regulatory infrastructure.
In September, the Penn Program on Regulation will bring together scholars from across Penn, as well as from other leading universities, to assess US regulation in light of its current crisis of confidence. PPR’s invitation-only conference will comprise a working dialogue organized around a series of papers to appear in a book that will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in early 2012. Contributors include Jonathan Baron (Penn Psychology), Matthew Baum (Harvard Kennedy School), Lori Bennear (Duke Nicholas School), Bill Bratton & Michael Wachter (Penn Law), Cary Coglianese & Chris Carrigan (Penn Law); Jon Klick, (Penn Law), Susan Moffitt (Brown University Political Science), Roberta Romano (Yale Law), Ted Ruger (Penn Law), Kip Viscusi & Richard Zeckhauser (Vanderbilt Law & Harvard Kennedy School), Susan Wachter (Penn Wharton), and Jason Yackee & Susan Yackee (Wisconsin Law/Political Science).
PPR Hosts Conference on U.S. Regulation Crisis (RegBlog coverage)
Flickr Photo Set: Regulatory Breakdown?