Past Seminars & Events

Fall 2011

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?
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011 4:30-6:00 pm | Huntsman Hall Room G50
Ambiguity and Climate Policy
Geoffrey Heal
Paul Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility Columbia Business School
Download Paper [PDF]

Monday, October 10, 2011
Subversion or Coordination? Examining the Role of Regulatory Agency Design in the Gulf Oil Disaster
12:00-1:15 pm, Rare Book Room, Tanenbaum 253 (inside Biddle Law Library)
Chris Carrigan, Fellow, Penn Program on Regulation
Download Paper [PDF]
Download Abstract [PDF]

Tuesday, October 18, 2011
China's Regulatory State
12:00 pm, Rare Book Room, Tanenbaum 253 (inside Biddle Law Library)
Penn Law School
Research Seminar with Prof. Roselyn Hsueh (Temple University)
Download Abstract [PDF]

Monday, October 24, 2011
Book Symposium
Networks in Telecommunications: Economics and Law
4:30-6:00 pm, Faculty Lounge, 144 Silverman Hall
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.
Download Abstract [PDF]

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 4:30-6:00 pm | Huntsman Hall Room G50
The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change
Dan M. Kahan
Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Download Paper [PDF]

Tuesday, November 29, 2011 4:30-6:00 pm | Huntsman Hall Room G50
Out of Balance: How Uncertainty Figures in Risk Analysis and Regulatory Economics
Adam M. Finkel
Senior Fellow and Executive Director, Penn Program on Regulation
Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health, UMDNJ School of Public Health
Details: In this seminar, Adam Finkel, Executive Director of the Penn Program on Regulation, critically examines the disparate treatment given to uncertainty in estimates by risk analysts and economists in the regulatory process. His analysis begins from the premise that errors, overconfidence, or the censoring of information from decision-makers and affected stakeholders are problems whether they occur on the benefit (risks reduced) or on the cost side of the regulatory ledger. He contrasts the substantial improvements in the attention paid to uncertainty by risk assessors over the past 20 years with a striking lack of improvement made by regulatory economists. Finkel develops a 10-level scoring hierarchy for how a regulatory cost analysis could treat uncertainty, presents scores for 75 EPA regulations promulgated in the 1990s, and closely analyzes various major rules from EPA, OSHA, FDA, and NHTSA finalized in the past 10 years. He argue that without a balanced treatment of uncertainty in benefit and in cost, regulatory decisions cannot hope to fulfill their potential, and he offers several sets of disciplinary, bureaucratic, normative, and legal reasons why this asymmetry may persist. By also focusing on how risk assessors and regulatory economists treat differently the aggregate welfare issue — that is, how a distribution of risks to individuals (or of costs to individuals) is summed or integrated to produce a social benefit or social cost estimate — Finkel argues that we currently manage costs and risks differently, as well as assess them with different degrees of rigor. Hide View Details

Spring 2011

Tuesday, January 25, 4:30-6:00 pm | F45 Huntsman
"Induced Development in Risky Locations: Fire Suppression and Land Use in the American West"
Sheila Olmstead, Fellow, Resources for the Future
Download Abstract (PDF)

Tuesday, February 22, 4:30-6:00 pm | F45 Huntsman
"Insurance Incentives for Improving Health Care Behavior"
Tom Baker, Deputy Dean & William Maul Measey Professor of Law and Health, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Kevin Volpp, Associate Professor of Medicine & Health Care Management, Director, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Center for Health Incentives, University of Pennsylvania
Download Paper 1 (Baker) [PDF]
Download Paper 2 (Volpp) [PDF]
Details: Poor health habits can contribute to rising health care costs. In recent years, many companies have tried to control costs by adopting wellness programs that encourage employees to quit smoking, lose weight, and exercise more regularly For example, the grocery giant Safeway, Inc., has reportedly kept its health costs from rising by implementing a voluntary program that provides workers with insurance premium discounts if they document progress in improving their health. Section 2705 of the 2010 Patient Protection Affordable Health Care Act seeks to promote such corporate wellness programs by expanding the insurance discounts that companies are allowed to offer their employees. In this seminar, Professor Volpp of Wharton and Penn Medicine will discuss Section 2705 -- known as the Safeway amendment -- and analyze the evidence on how financial incentives can be used to promote healthy behavior. Focusing on the relationship between premium adjustment and biometrics, he will raise the big policy issues raised by the Safeway amendment in terms of efficacy and ethics. Professor Tom Baker of Penn Law will follow with commentary including a discussion of how the Affordable Care Act directs the federal government to encourage public and private health insurance systems to expand the use of health incentives. He will also analyze examples of how similar incentive-based approaches have and have not worked in other lines of insurance in the past. Hide More

Tuesday, March 22, 4:30-6:00 pm | F45 Huntsman
"The Political Economy of Fraud on the Market"
William Wilson Bratton, Professor of Law & Co-Director, Institute for Law and Economics, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Michael L. Wachter, William B. Johnson Prof. of Law and Economics & Co-Director, Institute for Law and Economics, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Download Paper [PDF]
Details: A series of high-profile securities fraud cases over the last decade – from Enron to Madoff – have placed the issue of securities fraud high on the public policy agenda. One longstanding way to address fraud has been to allow private individuals to file class action suits claiming fraud on the market. Although the traditional justifications for fraud on the market class actions are widely thought to have failed, most observers continue to accept these private class action suits as a necessary enforcement supplement to the Securities and Exchange Commission's inadequate resources. Apparently even a private enforcement supplement that no longer makes much sense is better than no private enforcement supplement at all. In this seminar, Professors Bratton and Wachter question the continued acceptance of fraud on the market litigation, analyzing the sticking points that prevent its abolition and mapping a plausible route to a superior enforcement outcome. They recommend making more difficult the standards that plaintiffs need to meet to prevail in private litigation over securities fraud, while at the same time urging Congress to increase the SEC's public enforcement capabilities. The seminar will consider their proposal and will address the corporate governance, political, and economic barriers that need to be overcome to secure its implementation. Professors Bratton and Wachter will show that, as between the public and private sectors, public enforcement offers shareholders more value than does private enforcement. Public enforcement even now yields the shareholders higher damage returns per dollar invested, and it can be deployed more flexibly to target individual wrongdoers so as to enhance deterrence. Hide More

Fall 2010

Tuesday, September 28, 4:30-6:00 pm | F65 Huntsman
Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity
Douglas Kysar, Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Commentators:
Matthew Adler, Leon Meltzer Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Adam Finkel, Executive Director, Penn Program on Regulation
Kathleen Segerson, Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut
Details: The dominant economic paradigm in environmental, safety, and health regulation calls for policymakers to calculate and optimize the net benefits of proposed governmental interventions. In this seminar, Professor Kysar draws on his new book, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity, to challenge that dominant economic paradigm. He criticizes the notion that government responsibility to safeguard life can be adequately addressed from an assumed viewpoint of objectivity and optimization, and he argues that the attempt to specify environmental policies through empirical assessment and formalized choice models -- an attempt found most influentially in cost-benefit analysis — obscures the relation of agency and responsibility that the political community bears to its decisions. He favors relying on the principle of precaution to encourage moral self-awareness by a political community and viewing environmental law as part of the social glue that binds a political community together in pursuit of long-term and uncertain goals. To serve that function, law must have continuity with the concepts, values, and discourses expressed by real people. By literally denying the sacredness of life — and indeed the distinctiveness of anything — dominant economic approaches to environmental law fail these tests.

Tuesday, October 26, 4:30-6:00 pm | F65 Huntsman
Capture by Information: How Information Warfare is Waged in the Administrative State
Wendy Wagner, Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor, University of Texas School of Law
Details: The regulatory process is predicated on the assumption that a diverse mix of affected parties will engage in the process and thereby inform government decision making. In this seminar, and in her forthcoming book Information Capture (Cambridge University Press), Professor Wagner argues that this fundamental assumption breaks down in situations when excessive information and related filings are allowed to overwhelm the system. She argues that parties with ample resources and a sufficiently high stake in the outcome can often effectively capture the regulatory process by flooding regulatory officials with so many documents filled with myriad technicalities and details that the issues become inscrutable to most observers. Loading down governmental proceedings with excessive information also increases the costs of participation by others who will be affected by a regulation. As a result, Wagner argues, thinly financed groups drop out of participating in many proceedings due to scarce resources, leaving regulatory development and refinement dominated by a narrow set of interests – typically regulated parties. Even worse, she argues, the courts and the larger regulatory system provide few rewards for agencies that endeavor to take a comprehensive or innovative approach to solving a regulatory problem, and drive them instead to avoid displeasing the purveyors of information. Wagner argues further that information capture poses significant impediments to the expeditious creation of public-benefitting regulations. While government agencies have played information games with regulated parties over the last fifty years, thousands of premature deaths and injuries have occurred in the absence of sufficiently protective regulation for toxic agents in workplaces, communities, the food supply and commonly used commercial and home products.

Background Reading (PDF)

Tuesday, November 16, 4:30-6:00 pm | 1206 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall
Long-term Strategies for Reducing Losses from Extreme Events
Howard Kunreuther, Cecilia Yen Koo Professor; Professor of Decision Sciences and Business and Public Policy; Co-Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Managing Director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Details: The past decade has revealed a totally new dimension in losses from extreme events. In the United States the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a series of devastating hurricanes and storm surge, including Hurricane Katrina, and the recent BP oil spill are indicative of a new era of catastrophes. With respect to insurance, of the 25 most costly insured disasters in the world since 1970, 14 occurred since 2001, 12 of which were in the United States. This talk will suggest a role that insurance coupled with well enforced regulations and standards can play in reducing future damage and paying for losses following extreme events. After discussing the evolution over the past four decades of economic and insured losses due to major catastrophes, we propose guiding principles for developing sustainable insurance and mitigation programs. Recognizing that individuals often misperceive risks and are highly myopic we show how multi-year insurance contracts combined with multi-year home improvement loans can overcome these biases. We use the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) which covers $1.25 trillion of assets as a candidate for these measures. President Obama signed a one-year extension of the NFIP on September 30, 2010, so there is an opportunity to reform the program and show how these measures are likely to improve the well-being of residents in flood prone areas and social welfare as well as the relevance of multi-year contracts to other extreme events.

View Paper (PDF)

Spring 2010

Tuesday, April 20, 4:30-6:00pm G55 Huntsman
Why the Law is So Perverse
Leo Katz, Frank Carano Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania
Commentators: Bruce Chapman, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and Lewis Kornhauser, Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law, New York University
Details: Virtually all legal regimes share a number of extremely basic features. One of these is what one might call the "either/or" feature: The defendant is guilty or not, liable or not. There are no in-between verdicts, even though reality is rarely so clear-cut. In addition, virtually all legal regimes, even the most totalitarian, are replete with loopholes, and virtually all legal regimes, even the most liberal, clamp down on a truly stunning array of what seem like win-win transactions: surrogacy contracts, organ sales, pollution permits, to name just a few of the better known examples. And virtually all legal regimes shrink back from punishing certain kinds of highly immoral conduct – conduct that morality condemns more severely than many crimes – including rank ingratitude, bad parenting, or being a bad Samaritan. In this seminar based on a forthcoming book, Professor Katz offers a unified explanation for these and similarly universal perversities of the law. The perversities all turn out to be, he argues, traceable to a common cause, which is neither historical, psychological, nor economic, but essentially logical. The perversities arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties already familiar, and much better understood, from a different context, the theory of social choice (or less formally, the theory of voting) and multi-criterion decision-making. In this seminar, Professor Katz will argue that the seemingly inherent perversities of the law turn out to be just the counterpart of one of the many voting paradoxes that lie at the heart of social choice theory.

Download excerpt from "Why the Law is So Perverse" (PDF)

Tuesday, March 23, 4:30-6:00pm G55 Huntsman
Science and Policy after Climate-gate
Gary Yohe, Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, Wesleyan University
Details: Many in the popular press and other media, as well as some in the halls of Congress, are seizing on a few errors that have been found in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in an attempt to discredit the entire report. In this seminar, Professor Gary Yohe argues that none of the handful of misstatements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. He argues for the need to bring the focus back to credible science, rather than invented hyperbole, so that it can bear on the policy debate in the United States and throughout the world. He will also give particular attention to the quality-control mechanisms of the IPCC, and offer some suggestions about what might be done next to improve IPCC practices and restore full trust in climate science. He will conclude the seminar with an analysis of some remaining key policy issues, particularly the challenge of calibrating the economic value of adaptation to climate change.

View Paper (PDF)
Download March 12 letter from scientists to Congressional and other leaders (The letter can also be found here)

Thursday, March 18, 12:00-1:15pm | G52 Silverman Hall
The Missing Dimension of Safety: Risk and Complexity in Tort Law and Regulatory Governance
Angus Corbett, Visiting Scholar, Penn Law; Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney; and Fellow, Centre for Clinical Governance Research in Health at the University of New South Wales
Commentator: Tom Baker, William Maul Measey Professor of Law and Health Sciences, Penn Law
Details: What is the role of law in reducing preventable harm in society? In this seminar, Professor Corbett will discuss his research on the role of tort law and regulation in reducing transportation accidents and medical errors. He argues that the problem of tort law's capacity to induce changes in governance in health care is very different from the problem of preventing injuries on roads. He also draws a clear distinction between preventable harm and negligence, focusing on the role of tort law in inducing or inhibiting changes in the organizations and processes used to deliver health care, particularly changes in governance that have the capacity to reduce the occurrence of preventable harm.
This seminar is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served. For more information please e-mail agavin@law.upenn.edu

View Paper (PDF)

Tuesday, February 23, 4:30-6:00pm | G55, Jon Huntsman Hall
Well-being and Equity: A Framework for Policy Analysis
Matthew Adler, Leon Meltzer Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania
Details: Public policy creates winners and losers. Whether in setting tax policy, executing national defense, or implementing social and economic regulation, governments impose differential impacts on individuals and businesses. Over the years, economists and policy analysts have developed analytical techniques for estimating costs and benefits so as to calculate in meaningful ways the aggregate net benefits of alternative policies. Although these same analysts have long recognized that the distribution of impacts across winners and losers also matters, very little serious analytic work exists showing how to analyze these distributional differences across alternative policies. In this seminar, Professor Matt Adler of the University of Pennsylvania Law School shares the results of a path-breaking project that provides the first in-depth, systematic framework for analyzing both the aggregate and distributional effects of public policies. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Well-Being and Equity: A Framework for Policy Analysis, Professor Adler argues for the use of social welfare functions (SWFs) that are sensitive to fair distribution as well as efficiency. He proposes SWFs as a more attractive approach to policy analysis than cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and other dominant approaches. Professor Adler draws upon economics, philosophy, and law to provide a systematic defense and elaboration of the SWF framework.

Download Equity Metrics: How to Choose? [PDF]
Download excerpt from Well-Being and Equity (draft) [PDF]

Tuesday, January 26, 4:30-6:00pm | G55, Jon Huntsman Hall
Obama's Regulatory Agenda: A One-Year Retrospective
Susan E. Dudley, Director, The Regulatory Studies Center, George Washington University (former Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs); Sally Katzen, Executive Managing Director, the Podesta Group (former OIRA Administrator); Jeff Ruch, Executive Director, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER); Rena Steinzor, President, Center for Progressive Reform and Professor of Law, University of Maryland; Jim Tozzi, Co-Founder, Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (former Assistant Director, Office of Management & Budget). Moderated by Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Director, Penn Program on Regulation.
Details: A year after President Obama's inauguration, the Penn Program on Regulation convenes a panel of distinguished commentators to take stock of the administration's regulatory accomplishments and challenges. From health care to climate change to banking reform, the Obama Administration has taken on the most pressing and controversial domestic policy challenges of our time, each with important implications for government regulation. The administration has also launched major initiatives to increase the transparency of executive branch policymaking and to assess the process of White House oversight of regulatory agencies. Drawing on their high level experience inside and outside of government, from across Democrat and Republican administrations, panel members can be expected to offer a full exchange of insight on these and other developments during the past year as well over the path that lies ahead.

View Paper 1 (Coglianese) [PDF]
View Paper 2 (Dudley) [PDF]
View Paper 3 (Steinzor) [PDF]
View Paper 4 (Tozzi) [PDF]

Fall 2009

September 22, 4:30-6:00pm | G65 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
Comparative Effectiveness Research as Social Science: Implications for Technology Assessment in US Health Care Reform
Speaker: David Meltzer, Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Department of Economics and Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.
Description: The disciplinary roots of medical cost-effectiveness analysis include several social sciences, including economics and psychology, but the influence of many core concepts of these disciplines on cost-effectiveness analysis has been modest. This is especially true with respect to social scientific insights relating to behavior, which is rarely considered in assessing cost-effectiveness. This talk will use social scientific models drawn from economics, sociology, and psychology to reexamine the social-scientific foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis with a special focus on the importance of behavior, including the behavior of both patients and providers. Major areas of focus will include the importance of self-selection in cost-effectiveness analysis, the influence of social networks on physician practice patterns, and the determinants of patterns of opinion leadership among physicians.
View Paper (PDF) More

October 20, 4:30-6:00pm | G65 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
Regulating in the 21st Century: A New Federal Environmental and Consumer Protection Agency and Other Proposals for Reform
Speaker: J. Clarence "Terry" Davies, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Description: This seminar will feature a presentation by Terry Davies, a Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, a former Assistant Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and one of the authors of the 1970 government reorganization plan that created the EPA. Davies has recently joined with others in concluding that the U.S. health and environmental regulatory system has become "largely dysfunctional" and that "new technologies, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, will challenge the system even more." The solution, he will argue in his presentation, lies in an ambitious proposal intended to spur fundamental, rather than incremental, change in how government responds to environmental and health challenges. Davies proposes to reorganize six federal agencies (EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission) into a cabinet-level "Department of Environmental and Consumer Protection." The new Department would emphasize cradle-to-grave oversight of industrial products, using risk assessment and economic analysis embedded in a technology options analysis framework, and would involve affected stakeholders in decision-making to a much greater extent than currently. Davies' presentation will be followed with commentary on his proposal by two discussants: E. Donald Elliott (Yale Law School and a former EPA General Counsel) and Marissa Golden (Bryn Mawr College and author of What Motivates Bureaucrats?).
View Proposal (PDF)

November 17, 4:30-6:00pm | F60 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
Does the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Have a Future?
Speaker: Roberta Romano, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law and Director, Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law, Yale Law School.
Description: Although the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) received nearly unanimous congressional support in 2002, only a few years thereafter its wisdom was increasingly questioned and its supporters had to stave off attempts to recraft the legislation. The financial crisis of 2008 has sidelined efforts to alter the legislation's most costly provision (a requirement that management certify the adequacy of its internal accounting and other controls, and that an outside auditor attest to that certification), as Congress's attention has turned to overhauling the regulatory regime for financial institutions. There is, nonetheless, much to be learned about financial regulation and SOX's future, from an in-depth examination of the interplay of the government and private commissions created with an eye to revising the legislation, media coverage of those entities, and congressional responses. That interaction provides a map of political fault lines and assists in forecasting the prospects for recrafting SOX's certification provision. It also serves as a cautionary tale regarding significant regulation enacted in the midst of a financial-market crisis. The ongoing financial crisis has sidelined SOX, but its burdensome costs suggest that it might well, in due course, reemerge on the legislative agenda.
View Paper (PDF)

Spring 2009

Tuesday, January 27, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G 50 Jon Huntsman Hall
"Is EPA Protecting Public Health? New Directions for Risk Assessment in the Incoming Administration and Beyond"
Speaker: Thomas Burke, Associate Dean for Public Health Practice and Training, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD
View Article
View Papers (pdf): 1 | 2

Tuesday, February 24, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50 Jon Huntsman Hall
Climate Change: Nature and Action
Speaker: Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, Washington DC
View Abstract (pdf)
View Articles (pdf): 1 | 2
View Presentation (pdf - 10MB)
Presentation Video Clips (wmv): 1 | 2 | 3

Tuesday, March 24, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50 Jon Huntsman Hall
Rethinking Regulation in the Wake of the Financial Crisis
Speaker: David Moss, John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA
Details: In the face of the current economic crisis, there are now many calls for dramatic reform - and even overhaul - of economic regulation in the United States. What role should scholars play in this discussion, and what role can they play? What have been the greatest strengths and weaknesses in the study of regulation over recent decades, and what types of new work are most urgently needed? These are the central questions that will inform the discussion on March 24th.
View Paper (pdf)

Tuesday, April 21, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50 Jon Huntsman Hall, The Wharton School
Risks and Opportunities of Manned and Unmanned Space Flight
Speaker: Molly K. Macauley, Senior Fellow and Director of Academic Programs, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC
View Papers (pdf) 1 | 2 | 3
View Abstract (PDF)

Fall 2008

Tuesday, September 23, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50, Jon Huntsman Hall
Should Different Regulatory Agencies Use Different Values of Statistical Lives?
Speaker: Lisa Robinson
Topic: "Should Different Regulatory Agencies Use Different Values of Statistical Lives?"
View Paper (PDF)
Details: The benefits of Federal environmental, health, and safety regulations often result largely from the value of mortality risk reductions. For example, over 80 percent of the monetized benefits of air pollution regulations are attributable to averted premature mortality. Both theory and empirical research suggest that the value of these risk reductions may vary depending on their characteristics (e.g., on whether they are associated with particularly dreaded events, such as terrorism) and on the characteristics of those affected (e.g., their age and income). However, Federal agencies are adopting similar value per statistical life (VSL) estimates despite differences in the risks they regulate. This seminar will explore the VSL estimates used by various U.S. agencies and the potential effects of risk and population differences on these estimates. It will also address the advantages and drawbacks of using estimates tailored to particular regulatory scenarios, which could provide better information on the economic efficiency of policy options but may also raise equity concerns.

Tuesday, October 28, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50, Jon Huntsman Hall
Re-Regulating the Financial Markets In View of the Government Bailouts
Speaker: Dwight Jaffee, Willis Booth Professor of Banking, Finance, and Real Estate
Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
View Paper 1 (PDF)
View Paper 2 (PDF)
Topic: "Re-Regulating the Financial Markets In View of the Government Bailouts"
Details: The subprime crisis has been active now for almost 2 years. The government has used taxpayer resources to bail out extremely large financial firms and now an entire asset class (subprime mortgages). If the resulting moral hazard is left unchecked, even greater crises are likely. Nevertheless, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have offered no proposals to reform the regulation of the investment banks and the government-sponsored enterprises. In this presentation, Professor Jaffee will offer a proposal that he argues will (i) minimize the need for a Fed bailout in a future crisis, (ii) effectively maximize the role of market discipline in controlling risky activities, and (iii) maintain the overall efficiency of the US capital markets.

Tuesday, November 18, 4:30-6:00 p.m. | G50 Jon Huntsman Hall
The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries
Speaker: Thomas O. McGarity, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law
The University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Topic: "The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries"
Download Flyer for Book (PDF)
Download excerpt from Book (PDF)
Details: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has, during the George W. Administration, dramatically departed from its traditional hands-off policy with regard to federal preemption of state common law claims in the context of pharmaceuticals approved by that agency. No substantive change in the relevant statute, regulations or case law has prompted the agency's aggressive new stance on preemption. Rather, it is primarily motivated by the outgoing Administration's decision to bypass Congress in its eagerness to implement a long-standing "tort reform" agenda.
The Supreme Court will soon decide whether the Administration's position that state common law failure to warn cases pose such a clear obstacle to FDA's accomplishment of its statutory goals that such claims are preempted by the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. This is case represents a major skirmish in the ongoing "preemption war" that has been waged since the Supreme Court's landmark Cipollone decision, in which it held that the word "requirement" in a federal cigarette labeling law's express preemption clause included the duties imposed by state common law.
The Bush Administration did not limit its aggressive efforts to preempt state tort law to FDA. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Railroad Commission have adopted similar stances under their statutes, all of which contain express preemption clauses.
My presentation will describe the ongoing preemption war and analyze the relevant issues in the context of federal regulation of pharmaceutical products. As I argue in greater detail in my forthcoming book, "The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries, the outcome of this war is critical to the ability of the common law to provide corrective justice to injured plaintiffs and protective justice for those of us who have not yet been injured but are at risk from products and activities that are otherwise subject to federal regulation.