Associate Professor Stuart Shapiro has a new article, “Does Haste Make Waste? How Long Does it Take to do a Good Regulatory Impact Analysis?” (subscription required) in the academic journal Administration and Society, written with John Morrall of George Mason University. The article looks at the relationship between the amount of time spent doing and reviewing a cost-benefit analysis of a federal regulation and the usefulness of the analysis. Not surprisingly, Shapiro and Morrall find that the more time a federal agency spends developing a regulation, and the more time the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spends reviewing the regulation, the more information that the regulatory analysis contains. They conclude by recommending an increase in the size of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the part of OMB that reviews regulations.
