We study how to regulate a monopolistic firm using a robust-design, non-Bayesian approach. We derive a policy that minimizes the regulator’s worst-case regret, where regret is the difference between the regulator’s complete-information payoff and his realized payoff. When the regulator’s payoff is consumers’ surplus, he caps the firm’s average revenue. When his payoff is the total surplus of both consumers and the firm, he offers a piece rate subsidy to the firm while capping the total subsidy. For intermediate cases, the regulator combines these three policy instruments to balance three goals: protecting consumers’ surplus, mitigating underproduction, and limiting potential overproduction

Self-regulation is the private provision of public goods and private redistribution. This paper examines the scope of self-regulation motivated by altruistic moral preferences that are reciprocal and stronger the closer are citizens in a socioeconomic distance. The focus is on the role of organizations in increasing self-regulation by mitigating free-rider problems. Social label and certification organizations can expand the scope of self-regulation but not beyond that with unconditional altruism. Enforcement organizations expand the scope of self-regulation farther, and for-profit enforcement is more aggressive than non-profit enforcement. Enforcement through social pressure imposed by NGOs also expands the scope of self-regulation

Natural gas has replaced coal as the dominant fuel for US electricity generation. However, utilities in regulated US states have retired coal more slowly than others. We build a structural model of rate-of-return regulation during an energy transition where utilities face trade-offs between lowering costs and maintaining and using legacy capacity. A regulated utility facing carbon taxes lowers short-run coal generation 48 percent as much as a cost minimizer would. Thirty years after a sudden energy transition, a cost minimizer has retired 71 percent more coal capacity than the regulated utility. Alternative regulations may jeopardize affordability and reliability goals during energy transitions

Contrary to the standard economic advice, many regulations of financial intermediaries, as well as other regulations such as blue laws, fishing rules, zoning restrictions, or pollution controls, take the form of quantity controls rather than taxes. We argue that costs of enforcement are crucial to understanding these choices. When violations of quantity regulations are cheaper to discover than failures to pay taxes, the former can emerge as the optimal instrument for the government, even when it is less attractive in the absence of enforcement costs. This analysis is especially relevant to situations where private enforcement of regulations is crucial

We are delighted that Nicholas Rau has attempted to generalize our result that: the of rate of return regulation is highly sensitive to the nature of the uncertainty. His paper has stimulated us to reflect further on generalizing and simplifying our joint results. Originally, we stated the following results: a) If uncertainty affects the maximal quasi-rents function R(K, u) in a multiplicative way, R(K,u) = R(K)(1 + u), then a sufficiently large gap must exist between the regulated rate of return (s) and the cost of capital (i) to induce the firm to select ex ante a scale of plant greater than the scale chosen by the unregulated monopolist. The closer is the regulated rate to the cost of capital, the more likely is it that the regulated firm will select ex ante a smaller scale of plant than is chosen by the unregulated firm. Were that to occur, regulation would definitely be worse than no regulation. b) If the uncertainty enters the maximal quasi-rents function in an additive way, R(K,u) = R(K) + u, then the conventional Harvey Averch and Leland Johnson (A-J) occurs (unless the regulation drives it out of business). Rau's main conclusion is that: .... if the state of nature affects both the average and marginal return on capital, then whether an A-J or anti A-J prevails depends on the amount of randomness in the environment. The more 'noise,' the more likely is an anti A-J effect (p. 190). A general and simple statement of the regulation theorems is derived below which contains points a) and b) and Rau's conclusion as special cases. 1. A General Formulation of the Problem

Optimal regulatory policy is derived in a setting where the firm has better knowledge of demand than the regulator. When marginal production costs increase with output, the regulator can induce the firm to use its private information entirely in the social interest. When marginal costs decline with output, however, the regulator is unable to derive any benefit from the firm's superior knowledge, and a single price is established that is invariant to demand

Regulators often impose rules that constrain the behavior of market participants. We study the design of regulatory policy in an insurance market as a delegation problem. A regulator restricts the menus of contracts an informed firm is permitted to offer, the firm offers a permitted menu to each consumer, and consumers choose contracts from offered menus. If consumer types and firm signals are ordered in a way that reflects coverage need, the regulator can leverage the firm’s information by forcing the firm to offer specified additional options on each menu. Several extensions illustrate the practical application of our results

This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results show that changes in production prices and wages at country*industry levels are informative about the creation of rents impeding productivity in different ways and to different extents. A simulation based on OECD regulation indicators suggests that nearly all countries could expect sizeable gains in multifactor productivity from the implementation of large structural reform programs changing anticompetitive regulation practices on product and labor markets

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India's environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest but statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. In contrast, the water regulations had no measurable benefits. The available evidence leads us to cautiously conclude that higher demand for air quality prompted the effective enforcement of air pollution regulations, indicating that strong public support allows environmental regulations to succeed in weak institutional settings

This paper analyzes the effect of regulations governing land use and residential construction upon the course of housing prices in California. We explore the linkage between regulation and housing prices using measures of housing prices estimated from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1990 and 2000 Census of Population and Housing, together with a detailed cross-sectional land use regulation and growth controls in California cities. We explore mechanisms by which regulatory stringency may affect housing outcomes for consumers. First, we assess whether housing is more expensive in more regulated cities. Second, we assess whether growth in the city-level housing stock over the period of a decade depends on the degree of land-use regulation at the start of the decade. Finally, we estimate the price elasticity of housing supply for regulated and relatively unregulated cities. Our results suggest that current regulations have powerful effects on housing outcomes