Structured to Fail? Explaining Regulatory Performance under Competing Mandates

About this book

Following each of three major disasters--the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill, and the nuclear meltdown in Japan--policymakers responded by overhauling the associated regulatory infrastructure. In each case, the response was intended to sharpen the regulator's focus, predicated on the widely held view that asking an agency to satisfy both regulatory and non-regulatory roles induces organizational conflict and impedes performance. In this dissertation, I put this commonly accepted belief about agency structure to the test by analyzing the behavior of regulators also assigned significant, non-regulatory functions. Incorporating data on a broad set of U.S. federal agencies, I first establish that the conventional wisdom holds some truth: Regulators that combine purposes do not perform as well. Even so, through a mix of statistical analyses, formal modeling, and an in-depth study of the former U.S. offshore oil and gas regulator, the Minerals Management Service, I show that assigning regulatory and non-regulatory functions to one agency can, in some cases, still be better than dividing them between agencies.