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ANALYTICAL PAPER REQUIREMENT FOR BADM
1. Analyze a Federal agency’s proposal for a new or revised rule published in the Federal Register. Be sure the agency is asking for public comment, and be sure the proposal presents some substantive issues you can discuss. If the proposal is more than one year old, you must obtain approval for the topic.
Your task is to prepare a paper to let me decide whether I want to adopt the rule, change it, or reject it. You want to demonstrate your analytical prowess; you are likely to find that difficult if your topic is how an agency should change its procedural rules, for example. On the other hand, some seemingly minor rules (e.g., size standards for cucumbers) may raise significant policy issues. Consult with me if you have any doubts.
2. Due December 10. It should be about 15 pages if you work alone, 20 pages if you work in a group, double spaced, typed, with pages numbered.
You may work on the paper as a group project, provided that:
a. The group is small (no more than 3), and I have specifically approved it.
b. I have approved the topic. You can give me a note or email me with your group and topic for approval.
c. I expect a more substantial effort from a group paper than from an individual effort. In particular, I expect a more comprehensive research effort.
3. Your paper should be thorough, well reasoned, well organized, and well supported. It should accomplish the following tasks, although it will probably be best to organize the paper around the issues is raises, rather than the tasks listed below.
a. Describe briefly the agency’s proposal. What exactly are they going to require? Be sure to include a specific citation to the proposal.
b. Analyze the problem the agency is trying to solve. What market failure creates a need for intervention? How big is the problem? What causes it? Is it really a problem at all, or should it be left alone?
c. Summarize the major comments on the proposal. Comments are available, virtually always online, but precisely where is likely to depend on the agency. Comments submitted through the official portal for rules (www.regulations.gov) are available through that site, but my experience is that many agencies have an easier-to-use collection of the comments on their own websites. You’ll have to poke around to find it. You don’t need to read or summarize all of the individual comments, but you do need to describe what the significant interest groups have to say about the proposal. Your summary should be built around the pros and cons of the proposal from the perspective of the different interest groups. You don’t need to organize the summary group by group, (it may read better if it is organized around issues, rather than groups) but you should include the position of each of the major groups.
d. Look for relatively disinterested analyses of the issue to help understand what the agency is proposing and the likely effects of the rule. Academic articles addressing the specific rule you are considering will be rare, but articles addressing the general issues and analyzing alternative approaches are common, and will be extremely valuable. “Think tanks,” such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute, or the Center for American Progress often have their own analyses of regulatory issues. Also useful is the Mercatus Center, which files comments on many rules from a “public interest” perspective. You’ll need to check their websites; think tanks don’t often file comments on regulatory proposals (although, like Mercatus, they may). Think tanks have a political point of view, but it is not usually a self-interested perspective. I expect a well researched, well supported argument, with appropriate citations for facts, quotations, and opinions of others.
e. Make a recommendation. Should I adopt this rule, change it, or reject it? How is your recommendation consistent with the public interest in the sense that economists use the term (maximizing consumer welfare as judged by consumers)?
4. There are several ways to find a paper topic. You want a rule where the comment period will have ended before the paper is due, because otherwise there won’t be many comments filed (the major commenters use all the time available to polish their comment and tend to file on the last day).
a. You can do keyword searches on the rules at regulations.gov. This is probably the best way.
b. You can consult The Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, available online at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ua/index.html. This volume lists all ongoing agency activity with a (very brief) abstract of each regulatory proposal, and includes citations to the Federal Register for proposals that have already appeared. You can either pick an agency that does things that interest you, or consult the index.
c. You could also just browse through the Federal Register. The Federal Register is also available on line through http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/. Obviously, this is also an easy way to get a copy of the notice you eventually select.
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