Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents and Financial Crises

Policy Shock examines how policy-makers in industrialized democracies respond to major crises. After the immediate challenges of disaster management, crises often reveal new evidence or frame new normative perspectives that drive reforms designed to prevent future events of a similar magnitude. Such responses vary widely - from cosmetically masking inaction, to creating stronger incentive systems, requiring greater transparency, reorganizing government institutions and tightening regulatory standards. This book situates post-crisis regulatory policy-making through a set of conceptual essays written by leading scholars from economics, psychology and political science, which probe the latest thinking about risk analysis, risk perceptions, focusing events and narrative politics. It then presents ten historically-rich case studies that engage with crisis events in three policy domains: offshore oil, nuclear power and finance. It considers how governments can prepare to learn from crisis events - by creating standing expert investigative agencies to identify crisis causes and frame policy recommendations.

Edward J. Balleisen is Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Associate Professor of History at Duke University, North Carolina. A historian of regulatory governance in the United States, his latest book is Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (2017). He received his Ph.D. from Yale University, Connecticut.

Lori S. Bennear is an Associate Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at Duke University, North Caroline where she is also the Co-Director of the Rethinking Regulation Program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Faculty Lead in Energy Education at the Energy Initiative. Her research focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of flexible environmental policies including information disclosure regulations, management-based regulations, liability regimes and demand-side management programs. Her works spans environmental domains including toxics, drinking water and energy. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, Massachusetts.

Kimberly D. Krawiec is the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, North Carolina where she teaches courses on corporate law and financial regulation. Her research centers on the regulation of financial markets, 'taboo' or contested markets and business organizations. Current work examines boards of directors, organ donation and allocation systems, and the administrative process surrounding the Volcker Rule, a provision of Dodd-Frank. She has served as a commentator for the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI) of the American Bar Association and on the faculty of the National Association of Securities Dealers Institute for Professional Development at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

Jonathan B. Wiener is the Perkins Professor of Law and Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy at Duke University, North Carolina. He co-directs the program on Rethinking Regulation at Duke. He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF). He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and co-chair of the World Congress on Risk in 2012. His books include Risk vs Risk (1995), Reconstructing Climate Policy (2003) and The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (2011). Previously he served at the US Department of Justice, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) between 1990 and 1992, and helped draft Executive Order 12866 on regulatory review (1993). He clerked for federal judges Stephen G. Breyer (1988–89) and Jack B. Weinstein (1987–88). He received his J.D. (1987) and A.B. (1984, economics) from Harvard University, Massachusetts.