The impact of sunset review: A study of real estate licensing

This paper focuses on the impact that state sunset review has had on the real estate occupation's ability to restrict entry through the imposition of licensing requirements. The results presented indicate that the 1983 rejection rate for real estate brokers and salespersons was lower in states undergoing sunset review of real estate than in those states not undergoing such a review. Sunset appears to have the power to effect changes in the licensing behavior of the occupation considered in this analysis.     

Do fiscal rules dampen the political business cycle?

This paper develops and tests the theory that fiscal rules limit politicians' ability to manipulate the budget for electoral gain. Using panel data from the American states, I find evidence suggesting that stringent balanced budget rules dampen the political business cycle. That is, while spending rises before and falls after elections in states that can carry deficits into the next fiscal year, this pattern does not exist in states with strict “no-carry” rules. Neither binding gubernatorial term limits nor the partisan composition of government appear to significantly affect the magnitude of the political business cycle.     

The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies

Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies are effective only when the information they produce becomes “embedded” in the everyday decision‐making routines of information users and information disclosers. This double‐sided embeddedness is the most important condition for transparency systems' effectiveness. Based on detailed case analyses, we evaluate the user and discloser embeddedness of the eight major transparency policies. We then draw on a comprehensive inventory of prior studies of regulatory effectiveness to assess whether predictions about effectiveness based on characteristics of embeddedness are consistent with those evaluations. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management