U.S. Administrative Law eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Understanding and Mitigating Political Risks of Public-Private Partnerships in U.S. Infrastructure","authors":"M. J. Kim","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2431915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2431915","url":null,"abstract":"The U.S. has done much to promote the benefits of private sector participation in infrastructure in recent years. However, several major bottlenecks have impeded the implementation of these advances. Most challenging has been the myriad and continuing political oppositions, public controversies, and related political risks associated with private sector participation. It is now generally recognized that the biggest threat to private sector investment in infrastructure is not financial, but political. Relative to emerging economies, private investment communities in the past have generally considered the U.S. and other industrialized economies, with their efficient democratic institutions, as free from political risks. But the challenges related to political risks in infrastructure development through public-private partnerships have been especially problematic in the U.S. in recent years. Many aspects of the unique political culture in the U.S. have contributed to this perception of high political risks. Among others, they have included: (1) a strong tradition of publicly led and publicly subsidized infrastructure, (2) the resulting public unease around putting infrastructure assets in the private hands, (3) the bottom-up and decentralized planning and decision-making approach that leads to fragmentation in infrastructure development processes, (4) the political fragmentation resulting from 50 states having 50 different sets of political culture and rules of engagements, and (5) a legacy of strong collaborative relationships between public sponsors and local contractors motivated in part by the lengthy and costly infrastructure development process. The primary purposes of this study are to identify and better understand the multitude of potential political risks that can surface when the private sector participates in infrastructure development in the U.S., based on lessons learned from both within and outside the U.S., and to develop a broad risk mitigation strategy that can serve as a guideline for policymakers as they begin to undertake public-private partnership efforts. Because many of the political challenges and risks currently facing U.S. private participation efforts occur in the project inception and procurement phases, the discussions in this report focus on public sector responses in the early phases of project development.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121683968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Begone, Euclid! Leasing Custom and Zoning Provision Engaging Retail Consumer Tastes and Technologies in Thriving Urban Centers","authors":"Michael N. Widener","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2400725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2400725","url":null,"abstract":"Technology capacity and innovations conflate notions of private and public spaces; the latter today incorporate the Internet “lane,” while private spaces seek access to that pathway. Merchants and their landlords seemingly find themselves in a paradox. They must embrace consumer technology expectations to populate mercantile premises as public spaces. At the same time, merchants must make stores and restaurants places of novelty to grip the attention of customers seeking to share the intimacy of their experience with everyone. Technology presents physical retailing with its greatest threat while potentially becoming its strongest ally if properly channeled. Advocates for urban centers’ sustained vitality must translate into action technology and communications currents to retain merchandising’s vital role in place-making in CBDs, downtowns and similar densely developed community gathering places. This essay describes how stakeholders, including city and town administrators, must imprint public and private spaces (like retailing premises) to produce sustained demand for physical merchandising in dynamic community hives through innovative land use regulations and ICT management policies.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128453858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why Who Does What Matters: Governmental Design and Agency Performance","authors":"D. Hyman, William E. Kovacic","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2319466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2319466","url":null,"abstract":"How should the federal government be organized – and who (i.e., which departments, agencies, bureaus, and commissions) should do what? The issue is not new: President James Madison addressed governmental organization in his 1812 State of the Union Address, and in the last century, it is the rare President that does not propose to reorganize some part of the federal government. Indeed, on numerous occasions during the past century, virtually every part of the federal government has been repeatedly reorganized and reconfigured. In previous work, we examined the dynamics that influence the assignment of regulatory duties to an agency, how those dynamics (and the allocation of responsibilities) can change over time, and how the specific combination of regulatory functions and purposes affect agency decision-making. In this article, we focus on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”). Using the framework we developed in our previous work, we examine the costs and benefits of the design choices made by the architects of the CFPB, and make some (appropriately hedged) predictions about the future prospects of this latest addition to the federal bureaucracy. We also briefly consider the implications of our analysis for the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”).","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133442152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Brief of Prof. Kristin E. Hickman as Amicus Curiae in Support of Neither Party, United States v. Quality Stores, Inc. (United States Supreme Court)","authors":"Kristin E. Hickman","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2355500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2355500","url":null,"abstract":"This amicus brief was filed before the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Quality Stores, Inc., No. 12-1408, to discuss whether Chevron or Skidmore provides the appropriate standard for judicial review of IRS revenue rulings. The brief summarizes and expands upon arguments made in some of my past scholarship.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128143989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"'I Won't Back Down?' Complexity and Courage in Federal Decision-Making","authors":"S. Kelman, Ronald Sanders, Gayatri Pandit, Sarah Taylor","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2366901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2366901","url":null,"abstract":"Senior government executives make many decisions, and not-infrequently these are difficult. By \"difficult\" decisions, the literature generally means ones characterized by complicated and uncertain information, and hard tradeoffs among conflicting value objectives. In a range of interviews with high-level U.S. Federal Government Executives, we found interesting differences between outstanding, noticeably successful executives and controls regarding their \"most difficult\" decisions, both how they defined them and how they made them. Outstanding executives characterized the hardest decisions they made not as ones characterized by complexity but as ones requiring courage. Several other notable differences in decisionmaking style also emerged.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131159287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Validating Longitudinal Earnings in Dynamic Microsimulation Models: The Role of Outliers","authors":"Melissa M. Favreault, Owen Haaga","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2328734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2328734","url":null,"abstract":"Rapid growth in the earnings of the highest earners over the past two and a half decades has contributed to strains on Social Security’s finances and made projecting lifetime earnings on a year-by-year basis – already a complicated technical problem – even more challenging. This project uses various descriptive techniques and high-quality administrative earnings data matched to household surveys to explore related questions about the changing wage distribution. We first describe the characteristics of high earners, both at a point in time and over longer periods (from 1983 through 2010). We then evaluate how well SSA’s MINT7 dynamic microsimulation model projects inequality in the earnings distribution and the long-term characteristics of earnings paths.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"422 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114830437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Audits as Signals","authors":"M. Kotowski, D. Weisbach, R. Zeckhauser","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2311417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2311417","url":null,"abstract":"A broad array of law enforcement strategies, from income tax to bank regulation, involve self-reporting by regulated agents and auditing of some fraction of the reports by the regulating bureau. Standard models of self-reporting strategies assume that although bureaus only have estimates of the of an agent’s type, agents know the ability of bureaus to detect their misreports. We relax this assumption, and posit that agents only have an estimate of the auditing capabilities of bureaus. Enriching the model to allow two-sided private information changes the behavior of bureaus. A bureau that is weak at auditing, may wish to mimic a bureau that is strong. Strong bureaus may be able to signal their capabilities, but at a cost. We explore the pooling, separating, and semi-separating equilibria that result, and the policy implications. Important possible outcomes are that a cap on penalties increases compliance, audit hit rates are not informative of the quality of bureau behavior, and by mimicking strong bureaus even weak bureaus can induce compliance.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126536171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Republic of Choosing: A Behaviorist Goes to Washington","authors":"William H. Simon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2288734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2288734","url":null,"abstract":"Cass Sunstein’s book Simpler recounts the author’s efforts during his tenure in the first Obama administration to apply the policy tools he helped derive from behavioral economics. In this review, I suggest that, while Sunstein reports some notable achievements, he exaggerates the utility of the behaviorist toolkit. Behaviorist-inspired interventions are marginal to most of the largest policy problems, and they played little role in the Obama administration’s most important initiatives. The book also reflects a misguided political strategy.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"430 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123861613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Analysis of the Timeliness of Section 104 Inspection Reports: 2004-2010","authors":"Helen M. Roybark","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2275713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2275713","url":null,"abstract":"Section 104 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (USHR 2002) requires the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB or Board) to conduct inspections of each registered public accounting firm. Audit deficiencies that exceed certain thresholds are summarized in the public portion of the Board’s inspection reports. Critics have called for more timely disclosure of PCAOB inspection reports (Reilly 2006; Roybark 2006, 2009; Turner 2006). Roybark (2009) analyzed the 558 inspections reports issued by the PCAOB during 2004-2007 (December 31) to determine the time lags based on days from field-to-report. During its first year of triennial inspections (2004), the mean number of days from field-to-report was 416 for firms where audit deficiencies were reported. For 2004 annual inspections, the mean number of days ranged from 295 to 475 for national firms and 291 to 334 for Big-4 firms. And while some improvements on the timeliness of triennial inspection reports were originally reported, improvements reported for 2007 inspections dissipated once additional inspection reports for 2007 were subsequently issued during 2008-2010. So has the PCAOB actually improved its Section 104 reporting by issuing its inspection reports in a more timely manner? To answer this question, 1,323 triennial and annual inspection reports issued during 2004-2011 (June 9) are analyzed based on the time lag from the last date in the field to the issuance date of the inspection reports (field-to-report) to determine if the time lapse has improved since the Board issued its first inspection reports in 2004.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133726494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nonquantifiable","authors":"C. Sunstein","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2259279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2259279","url":null,"abstract":"Under existing Executive Orders, agencies are generally required to quantify both benefits and costs, and (to the extent permitted by law) to show that the former justify the latter. But when agencies lack relevant information, they cannot quantify certain benefits. If this is so, how should agencies decide whether and how to proceed? As a matter of actual practice, agencies often engage in “breakeven analysis,�? by which they explore how high the nonquantifiable benefits would have to be in order for the benefits to justify the costs. Breakeven analysis is most useful when the agency is able to identity lower or upper bounds, either through point estimates or through an assessment of expected value. If lower and upper bounds are not readily available, agencies might be able to make progress by exploring comparison cases in which relevant values have already been assigned (such as for a statistical life). When agencies cannot identify lower or upper bounds, and when helpful comparisons are unavailable, breakeven analysis may not be a great deal more than a hunch or a conclusion, or perhaps (when agencies choose to proceed) a way of announcing a decision in favor of precaution. Even if so, breakeven analysis does have the virtues of helping to identify what information is missing, of specifying the conditions under which benefits would justify costs (“conditional justification�?), and of explaining why some cases are especially hard. An understanding of breakeven analysis in regulatory policy has implications for how to approach nonquantifiable variables in many domains of public policy and ordinary life.","PeriodicalId":233762,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Administrative Law eJournal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114108205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}