Economic Knowledge in Regulation : The Use of Expertise by Independent Agencies

The Use of Expertise by Independent Regulatory Agencies addresses the underexplored question of the usage of economic knowledge by independent regulatory agencies and offers an innovative solution to operationalise hypotheses on the role of expertise in policy-making. It fills a gap in two different strands of literature: on independent regulatory agencies and on knowledge utilisation. Only a few authors have taken a comparable approach (eg, McGarity 1991, Morgenstern 1997), but their work focuses on US regulators, whereas little has been written on their European counterparts.

Lorna Schrefler is Research Fellow and Head of Regulatory Policy at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). She also collaborates with the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter and is a visiting researcher at the Institut d'Etudes Européennes of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Lorna co-authored several impact assessments and policy evaluations on European legal and economic issues for the European Parliament and the European Commission. She is among the external experts of the Single Market Observatory of the European Economic and Social Committee. Lorna holds a PhD in Politics from the Centre for European Governance, University of Exeter. Her research interests include better/smart regulation, (regulatory) impact assessment, the use of expertise in policy-making, independent regulatory agencies, the regulation of electronic communications in the EU, the EU Internal Market. She has published in Governance, and in Regulation & Governance.