Regulation articles from September 2001

Regulation archives from September 2001

For the record.
September 22, 2001... Analyzing Ayres I COMMEND IAN AYRES FOR Aspiring to expand the current categories of the national debate on campaign finance ("Should Campaign Donors Be Identified?" Regulation, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2001). Unlike many commentators, he...

Arsenic in drinking water. (Mercatus Reports).
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Public comment requested. Last January, the outgoing Clinton administration finalized a rule that would lower the allowable concentration of arsenic in drinking water systems from 50 micrograms per liter ([micro]g/L) to 10...

Ergonomics. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Options under consideration for addressing ergonomics injuries. Last November, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finalized sweeping new ergonomics regulations that are intended to eliminate or control...

Air conditioner efficiency standards. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Public comment requested. In the last days of the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) finalized new energy conservation standards for residential central air conditioners and central air conditioning heat pumps....

New Source Review. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Regulatory and enforcement options under consideration. EPA has taken an aggressive posture in the review and enforcement of air quality standards on new and recently modified emissions sources. Critics have charged that such...

Greenhouse gas emissions. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Petition under review. The International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) recently petitioned EPA to regulate certain greenhouse gas emissions. That petition is now under review. A number of criticisms have been leveled...

Basel capital accord. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Proposed rule under consideration. The international Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recently proposed a new framework that bank supervisors must use to evaluate operational risk. While most all observers agree that...

Registration of broker-dealers. (Mercatus Reports).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... STATUS: Proposed rule under consideration. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 amended the Commodity Exchange Act to allow trading of futures contracts on individual equity securities and narrow-based indices of equity...

Bringing JAVA to the CAFE. (Mercatus Reports: Commentary).
September 22, 2001... At the end of July, after a couple of premature leaks, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) finally released a report advocating higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for new automobiles sold in the United States. Changing...

Unchaining the workers. (Briefly Noted).
September 22, 2001... Since the adoption of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, individual workers have been chained to the will of the majority in choosing representatives to bargain over the terms and conditions of employment. Under the NLRA,...

Controlling cloning. (Briefly Noted).
September 22, 2001... The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched two new salvos in the battle over cloning. Last spring, Dr. Kathryn Zoon, director of the FDA'S Center for Bio logics Evaluation and Research, threatened to shut down any attempts at...

The World Bank's tobacco economics: Very creative welfare economics is being used to justify government intervention. (Health & Medicine).
September 22, 2001... ECONOMISTS HAVE ARGUED FOR TWO decades that smokers do not incur larger health care costs than non-smokers. That is because non-smokers, statistically, live longer than smokers and reach ages in which they incur large health care costs. What is...

The folly of "smart growth": Oregon's experience suggests "anti-sprawl" strategies worsen the problems they are intended to solve. (Property).
September 22, 2001... THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES, city and state governments are turning to "smart growth" urban planning strategies to slow suburban "sprawl." Spurred by concerns over traffic congestion, air pollution, and loss of open space, the plans are...

Clinton's brave new business world: the Bush administration must decide whether to continue its predecessor's efforts. (Antitrust).
September 22, 2001... AN AGGRESSIVE EFFORT TO USE antitrust law to regulate the economy took place almost unnoticed in the last four years of the Clinton presidency. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) set implicit tests for...

Connecting the pieces: Interconnection compensation rules are woefully out of date. (Telecommunications).
September 22, 2001... TELECOMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS of many types are developing in today's information economy, and they all need to exchange traffic between each other smoothly. Where networks have local market power (for example, where customers have little or no...

The arsenic controversy. (Special Report).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... ON THE FINAL DAY OF THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY last January 19, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved a new health and safety standard for public water systems. Under the standard, the allowable concentration of arsenic in drinking...

A costly benefit: Economic analysis does not support EPA's new arsenic rule. (The Arsenic Controversy).(Statistical Data Included)
September 22, 2001... THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Agency (EPA) recently finalized a rule that would reduce the maximum allowable level of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent, from the current limit of 50 micrograms per liter ([micro]g/L) to 10 [micro]g/L....

Underestimating arsenic's risk: the latest science supports tighter standards. (The Arsenic Controversy).
September 22, 2001... ARSENIC HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN TO BE acutely poisonous at high doses. However, if individuals ingest it at subacute doses, they become partially tolerant to the chemical. That makes arsenic the darling of detective story writers: A villain can...

Arsenic and old facts. (Commentary).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... The Burnett-Hahn and Wilson analyses of the proposal to reduce the allowed concentration of arsenic in drinking water differ primarily on one issue: Is the dose-response relationship between arsenic concentrations and cancer sublinear...

The California crisis. (Special Report).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... LAST WINTER, AMERICANS RECEIVED A LESSON in the fundamentals of economics as blackout after blackout rolled through California. The state, which depends on natural gas-driven turbines and hydroelectric generators to provide two-thirds of its...

Getting out of the dark: Market-based pricing could prevent future crises. (The California Crisis).
September 22, 2001... CALIFORNIA IS THE NATION'S LARGEST state, with a population of 34 million, and its economy produces more that all but a handful of nations on the planet. Thus, the electricity shortage that first struck the state more than a year ago caused...

Questioning the conventional "wisdom": the causes and solutions to the California crisis are not as simple as some say. (The California Crisis).
September 22, 2001... DEREGULATING AN INDUSTRY, LIKE flying an airplane, makes headlines only when there has been crash. Opening electricity markets, formerly a topic of interest to only a few aficionados, has become a major news story thanks to the California...

Turing off the lights: Consumer-allowed service interruptions could control market power and decrease prices. (The California Crisis).(Statistical Data Included)
September 22, 2001... EARLY LAST DECADE, CONGRESS PASSED legislation that allows the deregulation of wholesale electricity production and prices in the United States. Under the legislation, states or regions that implement deregulation must develop restructuring...

Roberts' free-market romance. (In Review).(The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance)
September 22, 2001... THE INVISIBLE HEART: An Economic Romance Russell Roberts 288 pp., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001 In the years following his 1931 move to the London School of Economics, Friedrich Hayek developed a friendship with his...

Saving democracy from the Internet. (In Review).(Republic.com)
September 22, 2001... REPUBLIC.COM By Cass R. Sunstein 224 pp., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001 Do you learn more about the world when you surf the Internet, or less? It seems obvious that most Americans would answer "more" to...

Arm the Chicks. (The Final Word).
September 22, 2001... BEFORE WE EVEN GET STARTED, I HAD nothing to do with the title. I always use the word "women." I almost graduated from high school in the '70s, so I know the rules and I know I'm not young enough to use "Gurl" or "Grrrl." I didn't want...