1,721,174 research outputs found
The Role of Procedural Controls in OSHA's Ergonomics Rulemaking
No full textFew, if any, regulations over the past decade have received the publicity or engendered the controversy of OSHA’s ergonomics regulation. Some may see the ergonomics rule as the paradigmatic instance of procedural hurdles holding up and eventually destroying a regulation. The purpose of this article is to examine the role that procedure played in the ergonomics rulemaking. To draw lessons from the ergonomics rulemaking I have conducted analyses of the four publicly available versions and conducted interviews with seven high ranking officials at OSHA and the Small Business Administration. I find that of the procedural hurdles faced by OSHA, the notice and comment requirement had the largest impact on the final rule. OMB review and requirements to conduct a cost benefit analysis served largely as a fire alarm to political overseers and the required small business panel had largely symbolic effects. The more traditional control of Congressional budgetary oversight had the greatest effect by delaying the rule for three years which eventually doomed OSHA’s attempts to regulate.Peer reviewe
Defragmenting the Regulatory Process
No full textThe regulatory process is often criticized for being cumbersome and slow, much like a computer whose hard drive is fragmented by files no longer used or useful. Like such a computer, the regulatory process contains many requirement of dubious utility. These include the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, and numerous executive orders. While other parts of the regulatory process such as notice and comment and cost-benefit analysis have received much more academic attention, these other parts of the process deserve examination as well. This paper argues that such an examination will reveal that these statutes and executive orders add little of value to the regulatory process while consuming agency resources. An improved requirement for cost-benefit analysis with distributional analysis could easily replace virtually all of these requirements and improve regulations while reducing the time needed to promulgate regulations.Peer reviewe
An Evaluation of the Bush Administration Reforms to the Regulatory Process
No full textThe Bush Administration has implemented more reforms to the regulatory process than any of its predecessors. These reforms are often stereotyped as anti-regulatory. This article examines the reforms as a whole and asks which interests have been empowered by the Bush Administration regulatory reforms. I believe this method is a more effective way of assessing the impact of the reforms. I find that in addition to adding potential costs to the regulatory process, the reforms are likely to empower powerful interest groups and the presidency. Whether the impact of these reforms is pro-regulation or anti-regulation will depend on how a future administration more dedicated to regulatory protections uses them. I also lay out a research agenda to better empirically assess the impact of these regulatory reforms.Peer reviewed"Issue published online: 11 APR 2007. Article first published online: 11 APR 2007"--Publisher website
Does the amount of participation matter? Public comments, agency responses and the time to finalize a regulation
No full textThe notice and comment rulemaking process is a fundamental part of how agencies write regulations. While this process is starting to receive more empirical attention, the question of how the number of comments that an agency receives affects its decision-making process has received little examination. This paper uses Boolean analysis to examine nine rules from two agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services and evaluates the impact of a high volume of comments on agency changes to proposed rules and the time an agency takes to finalize a proposed rule. These nine cases suggest that agencies are most likely to change their proposals when they receive a high volume of comments on highly complex rules that are not very politically salient. Highly complex rules are also likely to take a long time to finalize when there are many public comments however it is often other factors that cause a long delay between proposed and final rules.Peer reviewedThe final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11077-007-9051-
Dynamical bar instability in rotating stars: effect of general relativity
No full textWe study the dynamical stability against bar-mode deformation of rapidly and differentially rotating stars in the first post-Newtonian approximation of general relativity. We vary the compaction of the star M/R (where M is the gravitational mass and the equatorial circumferential radius) between 0.01 and 0.05 to isolate the influence of relativistic gravitation on the instability. For compactions in this moderate range, the critical value of for the onset of the dynamical instability (where T is the rotational kinetic energy and W the gravitational binding energy) slightly decreases from ~ 0.26 to ~ 0.25 with increasing compaction for our choice of the differential rotational law. Combined with our earlier findings based on simulations in full general relativity for stars with higher compaction, we conclude that relativistic gravitation {\em enhances} the dynamical bar-mode instability, i.e. the onset of instability sets in for smaller values of in relativistic gravity than in Newtonian gravity. We also find that once a triaxial structure forms after the bar-mode perturbation saturates in dynamically unstable stars, the triaxial shape is maintained, at least for several rotational periods. To check the reliability of our numerical integrations, we verify that the general relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz circulation is well-conserved, in addition to rest-mass energy, total mass-energy, linear and angular momentum. Conservation of circulation indicates that our code is not seriously affected by numerical viscosity. We determine the amplitude and frequency of the quasi-periodic gravitational waves emitted during the bar formation process using the quadrupole formula
The Future of the Bush Administration Regulatory Reforms
Full text linkThe past eight years have been busy ones for aficionados of the regulatory process. Not since the late 1970s and early 1980s have as many requirements been imposed upon agencies writing a regulation. These include the implementation of the Information Quality Act, regulatory peer review, Executive Order 13422, and electronic rulemaking requirements among others. Since many of these requirements were imposed by executive order or other presidential action, the new administration will have important choices to make about whether to weaken, maintain, or strengthen these requirements. These decisions will affect nearly every area of regulatory policy This paper examines the Bush reforms by asking whether an incoming administration with different regulatory priorities will find the increased presidential power over regulatory agencies worth the other potentially deleterious effects of the reforms. I argue that several of the Bush reforms, the use of prompt letters and control over guidance documents will prove attractive to the Obama Administration, while others such as regulatory peer review and the non-guidance components of Executive Order 13422 will not.
Presidents and Process: A Comparison of the Regulatory Process Under the Clinton and Bush (43) Administrations
Full text linkDo procedural controls placed on the regulatory process allow politicians to control bureaucratic decisionmaking? I use data on the regulatory process under the Clinton and Bush Administrations to assess the differences between these presidents with distinct ideological regulatory agendas. I find that the number of comments received, the changes made between proposal and finalization of rules, the frequency with which agencies bypass notice and comment and the time to complete a rulemaking did not vary substantially between the two presidencies. This raises questions about the effectiveness of procedural controls on agency decisionmaking.Regulatory Reform
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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