Does Regulation Kill Jobs? - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812223454 ISBN 13: 9780812223453

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

As millions of Americans struggle to find work in the wake of the Great Recession, politicians from both parties look to regulation in search of an economic cure. Some claim that burdensome regulations undermine private sector competitiveness and job growth, while others argue that tough new regulations actually create jobs at the same time that they provide other benefits. Does Regulation Kill Jobs? reveals the complex reality of regulation that supports neither partisan view. Leading legal scholars, economists, political scientists, and policy analysts show that individual regulations can at times induce employment shifts across firms, sectors, and regions—but regulation overall is neither a prime job killer nor a key job creator. The challenge for policymakers is to look carefully at individual regulatory proposals to discern any job shifting they may cause and then to make regulatory decisions sensitive to anticipated employment effects. Drawing on their analyses, contributors recommend methods for obtaining better estimates of job impacts when evaluating regulatory costs and benefits. They also assess possible ways of reforming regulatory institutions and processes to take better account of employment effects in policy decision-making.

Does Regulation Kills Jobs? tackles what has become a heated partisan issue with exactly the kind of careful analysis policymakers need in order to make better policy decisions, providing insights that will benefit both politicians and citizens who seek economic growth as well as the protection of public health and safety, financial security, environmental sustainability, and other civic goals.

Contributors: Matthew D. Adler, Joseph E. Aldy, Christopher Carrigan, Cary Coglianese, E. Donald Elliott, Rolf Färe, Ann Ferris, Adam M. Finkel, Wayne B. Gray, Shawna Grosskopf, Michael A. Livermore, Brian F. Mannix, Jonathan S. Masur, Al McGartland, Richard Morgenstern, Carl A. Pasurka, Jr., William A. Pizer, Eric A. Posner, Lisa A. Robinson, Jason A. Schwartz, Ronald J. Shadbegian, Stuart Shapiro.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cary Coglianese is Edward B. Shils Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Penn Program on Regulation, and editor of Regulatory Breakdown: The Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Regulation and coeditor of Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Adam M. Finkel is Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania, and coeditor of Import Safety. Christopher Carrigan Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University. Visit Does Regulation Kill Jobs? at the Penn Program on Regulation web site for contributor information and other details.

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Chapter 1
The Jobs and Regulation Debate
Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan

The Great Recession wreaked havoc on employment in the United States. Even as the overall economy officially began to pick up by the middle of 2009, the American labor force still struggled to rebound. Month after month, millions of workers lost their jobs and millions more continued to look for new full-time work. Politicians responded to this great economic crisis by, among other things, blaming regulation (Coglianese 2012a). Some blamed the lack of adequate regulation for triggering the economic collapse in the first place, while others blamed regulation and its attendant burdens for hampering the pace of recovery. For those in the latter group, the phrase "job-killing regulations" became a common rallying cry for a regulatory reform agenda. Still other politicians argued that strong regulations not only could prevent future economic, environmental, and public health disasters but would actually stimulate new jobs, forcing companies to innovate and creating so-called green jobs.

Although ideological differences account for much of the polarized political debate over jobs and regulation in the United States, this debate fundamentally centers on an empirical question—namely, what impact regulation has on employment. This question can and should be approached with rigorous economic and policy analysis, and fortunately some important research has already addressed the empirical question. Nevertheless, uncertainty remains about how generalizable existing research findings are to today's economy as well as exactly how to incorporate what is known about jobs and regulation into decision making about specific new regulations. Given the importance to society of having both effective regulation and available employment opportunities, we have assembled this volume to advance the search for a better understanding of how regulation affects jobs.

In this opening chapter, we begin by showing in greater detail how the political debate over the economy has in recent years also turned into a debate over regulation, with partisans claiming that regulation either kills or creates jobs. Notwithstanding this political rhetoric, the existing empirical research suggests that regulation does relatively little to reduce or increase overall jobs in the United States. We consider here why, given that the published economics research does not provide a strong basis for believing that regulation affects overall employment levels, the political debate has nevertheless focused so much on regulation's impact on jobs. We offer an account of the political economy of the jobs and regulation debate that emphasizes the distribution of job impacts and the greater responsiveness of the political system to relatively more certain, identifiable job losses than to less certain, unspecified job gains, even if in the aggregate the latter fully offset the former. Our aim is not merely to understand better the puzzling disconnect between politics and economics on this issue but also to explain why both regulators and researchers ought to be more attentive to the kinds of analytic and empirical issues raised throughout this book. Only by developing better estimates of the real effects of regulation on employment can policy debate in the United States even hope to rise above the current polarized predicament where regulation's effects on jobs are too often either superficially treated or overblown by officials on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

Jobs and Regulation on the Political Agenda

The worst U.S. worst recession since the 1930s ushered in a deep and sustained period of job losses. Before the recession started in 2007, the national unemployment rate hovered at around 4.5 percent, but it quickly rose to over 7 percent by the end of 2008 and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013a). Once the recession officially ended, unemployment took longer to rebound than in any previous recession, remaining at levels above 8 percent for more than three additional years (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013a). As of February 2013, the United States still had 12 million persons out of work (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013b). In addition, a substantial proportion of unemployed individuals had been out of work for up to a year or more. Prior to the recession, about 645,000 individuals could be counted as having been unemployed for a year or more, but by 2010 this number had risen to 4.5 million, the largest share of the U.S. labor force facing such long-term unemployment on record (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010).

The unemployment crisis prompted a heated political response. Republicans seized on the costs that regulations necessarily impose on business and began repeatedly referring to regulations as "job-killers" (Coglianese 2011), developing what one columnist referred to as "a seemingly immutable law of . . . rhetoric that the word 'regulation' can never appear unadorned by the essential adjective 'job-killing'" (Marcus 2012). In a Republican presidential primary debate in June 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann opined that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America" (CNN 2011). Another candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, called for "ending the EPA's regulatory reign of terror" (Malcolm 2011), while yet another, Texas Governor Rick Perry, referred to a "cemetery for jobs at the EPA" (Broder and Galbraith 2011). The eventual Republican presidential nominee in 2012, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, made regulatory reform one of the key parts of his plan for restoring economic growth, lambasting what he saw as the government's destruction of the American dream of economic prosperity "day by day, job-killing regulation by job-killing regulation" (Romney 2012). Even after President Obama's reelection, Republicans continued to press their argument. In giving the Republican response to President Obama's 2013 State of the Union address, for example, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) disparaged the passage of "job-killing laws" (Rubio 2013).

Democrats, of course, had their own rhetorical playbook. Although President Obama (2011b) acknowledged that some regulations can be burdensome and even have a "chilling effect" on the economy, he also repeatedly defended the importance of regulation in protecting the public from economic and environmental disasters. Democrats used the words "common sense" instead of "job-killing" in connection with regulation, defending the need for sensible rules to protect the public from the undesirable by-products of economic activity (Obama 2013a; Reid 2011). Democrats also continued to blame the lack of effective regulation for the economic crisis that triggered the recession (Coglianese 2012a; Obama 2012a), attacking the Republicans' job-killing argument as a "myth" designed only to help them in "peddling a cure-all tonic of deregulation" (Reid 2011).

Responding to the charges leveled specifically against environmental regulation, advocates of more stringent regulation adopted a countervailing rhetoric about "green jobs" (Middle Class Task Force 2009). The basic idea is that the imposition of regulations that call for the adoption of pollution control technology or techniques will support the development of new jobs in firms that produce the required technologies or the know-how to deploy the required techniques. Moreover, such regulations may create jobs within the affected firms, as when companies subject to new requirements need to hire additional staff to monitor compliance or when mandates induce changes to business operations that simply make those operations more labor intensive. Former EPA administrator Carol Browner defended the federal environmental agency...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812223454
• ISBN 13: 9780812223453
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Herausgeber: Coglianese Cary, Finkel Adam M., Carrigan Christopher
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland