The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

This book shows how deregulation is transforming the size, structure, and geographic range of U.S. banks, the scope of banking services, and the nature of bank-customer relationships. Over the past two decades the characteristics that had made American banks different from other banks throughout the world--a fragmented geographical structure of the industry, which restricted the scale of banks and their ability to compete with one another, and strict limits on the kinds of products and services commercial banks could offer--virtually have been eliminated. Understanding the origins and persistence of the unique banking regulations that defined U.S. banking for over a century lends an important perspective on the economic and political causes and consequences of the current process of deregulation.