In this study, I examine how the regulatory analysis practices of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), an independent regulatory agency, changed when the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) of 2008 relaxed its statutory obligations to conduct benefit-cost analysis (BCA). When given discretion, the agency dropped the practice despite significant institutional experience in conducting regulatory BCA and a history of using BCA as a key input to regulatory decisions. While the decision reflects an agency belief that omitting BCA would speed rulemaking under the CPSIA, the results have been mixed. Moreover, choosing to forego BCA-based decision-making fundamentally changed the agency’s regulatory portfolio. In contrast to the typical rule CPSC historically supported with BCA findings, many of the CPSIA rules impose significant economic burdens yet appear to yield negligible benefits. The CPSC would have been unlikely to have pursued the CPSIA rulemakings on its own because it could not have made the necessary BCA findings.

We document a substantial customer complaint gap between stock and mutual financial firms. To assess whether this 21% per year complaint gap stems from complaint-prone customers in stock insurers, we examine state-adjudicated complaint success. To further delineate between customer selection or treatment explanations, we exploit within insurer complaints around random claims (natural disasters) and attention shocks (media scrutiny). Further tests reveal the complaint gap widens with greater competition, near insolvency thresholds, and with more price regulation. Overall, the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that mutual financial firms exhibit low customer satisfaction, suggestingcustomers find this a beneficial organizational structure.

Multinationals experienced a great growth after the European postwar boom. Factors in the 1970s included increasing competition from the United States, the emerging European market, as well as ongoing economic crises and changes in the international economy. The articles analyzes three case studies of Western European chemical companies—Hoechst, Akzo, and Rhône-Poulenc—to show the consequences of structural changes on management and the workforce. This article argues that (1) domestic export-oriented supplement investments lost importance, and the domestic workforce had a harder time meeting qualification requirements; (2) organizational changes incorporated divisional competitive elements into a company’s organization of work; and (3) managers had to learn to respect national path dependencies and specific skills of the local workforce. Furthermore, it illustrates the developments of the workforce in Europe and abroad and stresses the importance of nationality within the management of multinationals.

The past three decades have witnessed a spectacular evolution in policies toward foreign direct investment (FDI). Whose interests do these policy innovations reflect? While existing theory suggests popular pressure drives openness, I argue reforms occur when shifts in financial access change local economic elites’ policy preferences toward FDI. When large domestic firms no longer have access to cheap credit through political connections, liquidity constraints outweigh firms' preferences to exclude foreigners. Economic elites then pressure governments to pursue liberal FDI policy environments. Using a combination of measures of FDI policy for up to 166 countries from 1973–2015, I find increases in financial constraints are robustly associated with decreases in foreign equity restrictions, and this relationship is strongest when domestic political institutions favor business interests. A financing constraints explanation of FDI policy reform has important implications for explanations of policy change, theories of business power amid increased interdependence, and expectations over the distributive effects of globalization.

We develop a tractable dynamic model of an index option market maker with limited capital. We solve for the variance risk premium and option prices as a function of the asset dynamics and market maker option holdings and wealth. The market maker absorbs end users’ positive demand and requires a more negative variance risk premium when she incurs losses. We estimate the model using returns, options, and inventory and find that it performs well, especially during the financial crisis. The restrictions imposed by nested existing reduced-form stochastic-volatility models are strongly rejected in favor of the model with a market maker.