The first is Professor Balleisen’s extensive review essay Rights of Way, Red Flags, and Safety Valves: Regulated Business Self-Regulation in America, 1850-1940, which will appear in Regulated Self-Regulation in the Western World in the Late 19th and the Early 20th Century, ed. Peter Collin, Gerd Bender, Stefan Ruppert, Margrit Seckelmann, and Michael Stolleis (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2013).
Also available is a paper Professor Balleisen wrote with his student Elizabeth Brake, Historical Perspective and Better Regulatory Governance: An Agenda for Institutional Reform. It has been accepted for publication in Regulation and Governance. Here is the abstract:
Compared to economics, sociology, political science, and law, the discipline of history has had a limited role in the wide-ranging efforts to reconsider strategies of regulatory governance, especially inside regulatory institutions. This article explores how more sustained historical perspective might improve regulatory decision-making. We first survey how a set of American regulatory agencies currently rely on historical research and analysis, whether for the purposes of public relations or as a means of supporting policy-making. We then consider how regulatory agencies might draw on history more self-consciously, more strategically, and to greater effect. Three areas stand out in this regard -the use of history to improve understanding of institutional culture; reliance on historical analysis to test the empirical plausibility of conceptual models that make assumptions about the likelihood of potential economic outcomes; and integration of historical research methods into program and policy evaluation.
