Additional information
by Lorna S. Schrefler (Author)
It is conventional to argue that the autonomy and reputation of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) depend on their expertise. Yet, studies on how IRAs create and deploy their knowledge capacity are few and far apart. By addressing the underexplored question of the role of economics in regulatory policy making, this book fills a gap in two different strands of literature: on IRAs and on knowledge utilisation respectively. Only a few authors have taken a somewhat comparable approach (eg McGarity 1991, Morgenstern 1997, Jennings and Hall 2011), but their work focuses on US regulators. Conversely, little has been written on their European counterparts. This book also proposes an innovative solution to operationalise hypotheses on the role of expertise in policy making, and makes this contribution particularly relevant for recent debates on evidence-based policy making. Finally, it takes a close look at specific regulatory decisions by one of the oldest and most authoritative regulators.
Author Biography
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 and Governance.
