Government regulations seek to improve citizens’ health, safety, and financial and economic well-being. While regulations are intended to foster more efficient and equitable markets by correcting market failures, they can also impede innovation, inhibit markets, and impose additional costs on consumers and businesses if they are not formulated and implemented carefully. The importance of regulation to various policy areas has only increased as lawmakers have delegated more and more policymaking powers to regulatory agencies. Meanwhile rapid technological growth in recent decades has transformed entire industries, leading regulators across the world to propose new regulatory frameworks to govern novel technologies. The expanding scope and complexity of regulations at the local, state, national, and international level along with the need for entirely new regulatory domains warrants an expanded examination of the effects of regulation—both intended and unintended—to ensure that they are achieving their objectives while minimizing costs. It is therefore imperative to advance our understanding of rapidly changing modern-day markets and how to regulate them most effectively.
The Center on Regulation and Markets (CRM) at Brookings creates and promotes rigorous economic scholarship to inform regulatory policymaking, the regulatory process, and the efficient and equitable functioning of economic markets. The Center provides independent, non-partisan research on regulatory policy, applied broadly across microeconomic fields with a particular focus on the following areas:
- Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies
- Financial markets and fintech
- Regulatory process
- Consumer protection and anti-trust
- Climate change and carbon pricing
The Center accomplishes this through a broad range of research, publications, and events that foster essential debates among preeminent academic experts, practitioners, and policymakers, with the aim of producing more efficient regulations, protecting consumers, and not overburdening firms. The Center puts particular value on emphasizing rigorous, economic research and policy analysis, while at the same time drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary insights from a distinguished group of Brookings scholars and external contributors. The activities of the Center are currently largely organized around four major contributor series:
- Series: The Economics and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies
- Series: Reimagining Modern-day Markets and Regulations
- Series on Regulatory Process and Perspective
- Series on Financial Markets and Regulation
The Center on Regulation and Markets is supported by individuals and institutional gifts. We are grateful for the ongoing support provided by the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development, and support from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Alex C. Walker Family Foundation, John Mulliken (Founder, The Carbon Zero Project), and Lyft.