Publications

Today, the generation and use of huge volumes of data are redefining our “intelligence” capacity and our social and economic landscapes, spurring new industries, processes and products, and creating significant competitive advantages. In this sense, data-driven innovation (DDI) has become a key pillar of 21st-century growth, with the potential to significantly enhance productivity, resource efficiency, economic competitiveness, and social well-being.Greater access to and use of data create a wide array of impacts and policy challenges, ranging from privacy and consumer protection to open access issues and measurement concerns, across public and private health, legal and science domains. This report aims to improve the evidence base on the role of DDI for promoting growth and well-being, and provide policy guidance on how to maximise the benefits of DDI and mitigate the associated economic and societal risks.

As behavioural sciences are unearthing the complex cognitive framework in which people make decisions, policymakers seem increasingly ready to design behaviourally-informed regulations to induce behaviour change in the interests of the individual and society. After discussing what behavioural sciences have to offer to administrative law, this paper explores the extent to which administrative law may accommodate their findings into the regulatory process. After presenting the main regulatory tools capable of operationalizing behavioural insights, it builds a case for integrating them into public policymaking. In particular, this paper examines the challenges and frictions of behavioural regulation with regard both to established features of administrative law, such as the principle of legality, impartiality and judicial oversight and more innovative control mechanisms such as the use of randomized control trials to test new public policies. This analysis suggests the need to develop a legal framework capable of ensuring that behavioural considerations may inform the regulatory process while at the same time guaranteeing citizens' constitutional rights and freedoms vis-à-vis the Regulatory State.

Over the past five years, behavioural economics has been rapidly propelled from the margins of economic analysis towards the policy mainstream. In this context, this study offers an international review of the initial applications of behavioural economics to policy, with a particular focus on regulatory policy. It describes the extent to which behavioural findings have begun to influence public policy in a number of OECD countries, referring to a total of more than 60 instances, the majority of which concern regulatory policy.

The present article examines the concept of effectiveness in relation to European legislation. Effectiveness is a concern associated with European legislation since the early days of the internal market and one that is assuming increasingly disconcerting dimensions. However, in its existing understanding, effectiveness is almost exclusively linked to transposition, implementation and enforcement of European legislation by the member states and is not seen as an indicator of legislative quality that pemeates the entire process of legislative design and drafting. This article maintains that the dynamic concept of legislative effectiveness is linked not only to the transposition and the implementation of legislation but primarily to choices of legislative design and drafting. The design and drafting of European legislation pose specific challenges to me capacity of legislation to achieve common minimum standards and results. These challenges are explored in detail by looking into the European Equality Directives (Directives 2000/78/EC and 2000/43/EC). This article concludes that effectiveness as a law making principle is not adequately reflected in the existing European law-making toolkit and a new approach is required that sets effectiveness at the ‘heart’ of me law-making culture and process.

This book constitutes the first thorough academic analysis of legislative drafting. By placing the study of legislation and its principles within the paradigm of Flyvberg's phronetic social sciences, it offers a novel approach which breaks the tradition of unimaginative past descriptive reiterations of drafting conventions. Instead of prescribing rules for legislation, it sets out to identify efficacy as the main aim of the actors in the policy, legislative and drafting processes, and effectiveness as the main goal in the drafting of legislation. Through the prism of effectiveness as synonymous with legislative quality, the book explores the stages of the drafting process; guides the reader through structure and sections in their logical sequence, and introduces rules for drafting preliminary, substantive and final provisions. Special provisions, comparative legislative drafting and training for drafters complete this thorough analysis of the drafting of legislation as a tool for regulation. Instead of teaching the reader which drafting rules prevail, the book explores the reasons why drafting rules have come about, thus encouraging readers to understand what goal is served by each rule and how each rule applies. The book is aimed at academics and practitioners who draft or use statutory law in the common or civil law traditions.

The objective of this paper is to introduce the main tools used to manage the flow and the stock of regulation with special attention to those based on economic analysis, their advantages and weak points, the consequences of their use in public sector organization, procedures and, in general, in the relationship between regulators and their targets. Discussion is also devoted to conditions for improving their efficacy, since the tools need to be used selectively, and require an agenda-setting phase as well as periodic retrospective analysis of existing rules as used in the whole regulation life cycle. Therefore, it is crucial to understand what these good regulation tools are really intended for, and to avoid their over or under-evaluation, both of which could be influential in reforms made partially or in name only. At the same time, their limits could incentivize the search for innovative solutions, such as a special attention to the real needs and behaviour of people in the design of new regulation, as well as in its measurement and reform

This guidance provides practical, technical and user-friendly guidance on measuring and reducing compliance costs of regulation in OECD countries. The guidance covers all of the key aspects of compliance cost assessment, including step-by-step advice on the process of completing detailed assessments. OECD member country governments will be able use this guidance document as a template for the development of country-specific guidance; tailoring and adapting the contents to best support their individual policy requirements. This guidance was published as part of the OECD’s work on regulatory policy.

How regulations are implemented and enforced, and how compliance is ensured and promoted, are critical determinants of whether a regulatory system is working as intended. Inspections are one of the most important ways to enforce regulations and to ensure regulatory compliance. Based on the 2014 OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Enforcement and Inspection, this Toolkit offers government officials, regulators, stakeholders and experts a simple tool for assessing the inspection and enforcement system in a given jurisdiction, institution or structure. Its checklist of 12 criteria can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses, gauge actual performance, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
The OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy: Regulatory Enforcement and Inspections seeks to construct an overarching framework to support initiatives on improving regulatory enforcement through inspections, making them more effective, efficient, less burdensome for those who are inspected and at the same time less resource-demanding for governments. The principles address the design of the policies, institutions and tools to promote effective compliance – and the process of reforming inspection services to achieve results.
The report complements the 2012 Recommendation of the Council on Regulatory Policy and Governance and is intended to assist countries in reforming inspections and developing cross-cutting policies on regulatory enforcement. The principles have an informal non-binding status of a guidance approved at the Regulatory Policy Committee level.

This article provides insights into the effective regulation of private sector innovation. It coins a term—“innovation-framing regulation”—to describe a particular quality of much of financial regulation in the recent era. It sketches a particular financial innovation (securitization and the marketing of securitized assets on derivatives markets), and describes three regulatory interactions having to do with that innovation. I identify three key assumptions that are ripe for re-evaluation: the notion that private sector innovation is beneficial, virtually by definition; the assumption that the regulatory moment is the crucial moment in regulatory design; and the belief that regulation somehow sits outside innovation and can be untouched by it. I argue that effective regulation of private sector innovation requires a clearer and more nuanced understanding of innovation, and engagement with the normative choices underpinning innovation-framing regulation.

How can individuals best be encouraged to take more responsibility for their well-being and their environment or to behave more ethically in their business transactions? Across the world, governments are showing a growing interest in using behavioural economic research to inform the design of nudges which, some suggest, might encourage citizens to adopt beneficial patterns of behaviour. In this fascinating collection, leading academic economists, psychologists and philosophers reflect on how behavioural economic findings can be used to help inform the design of policy initiatives in the areas of health, education, the environment, personal finances and worker remuneration. Each chapter is accompanied by a shorter 'response' that provides critical commentary and an alternative perspective. This accessible book will interest academic researchers, graduate students and policy-makers across a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Simpler government arrived four years ago. It helped put money in your pocket. It saved hours of your time. It improved your children’s diet, lengthened your life span, and benefited businesses large and small. It did so by issuing fewer regulations, by insisting on smarter regulations, and by eliminating or improving old regulations. Cass R. Sunstein, as administrator of the most powerful White House office you’ve never heard of, oversaw it and explains how it works, why government will never be the same again (thank goodness), and what must happen in the future.
Cutting-edge research in behavioral economics has influenced business and politics. Long at the forefront of that research, Sunstein, for three years President Obama’s “regulatory czar” heading the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, oversaw a far-reaching restructuring of America’s regulatory state. In this highly anticipated book, Sunstein pulls back the curtain to show what was done, why Americans are better off as a result, and what the future has in store.
The evidence is all around you, and more is coming soon. Simplified mortgages and student loan applications. Scorecards for colleges and universities. Improved labeling of food and energy-efficient appliances and cars. Calories printed on chain restaurant menus. Healthier food in public schools. Backed by historic executive orders ensuring transparency and accountability, simpler government can be found in new initiatives that save money and time, improve health, and lengthen lives. Simpler: The Future of Government will transform what you think government can and should accomplish.