On August 26, 2014, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a final rule on continued at-reactor storage of spent nuclear fuel and terminated a two-year suspension of final licensing actions for new nuclear power plants and license renewals of existing plants. The 2014 “Continued Storage” rule is good news for opponents of Yucca Mountain. First, the NRC determination that spent nuclear fuel can be safely managed in dry casks for up to 160 years eliminates the argument that the successful licensing of Yucca Mountain is required to assure the continued licensing of nuclear reactors. The future of Yucca Mountain and the future of nuclear power are now separate. Second, the NRC environmental impact statement (EIS) prepared in support of the Continued Storage Rule defines the “no action” alternative required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in a manner that negates the key “no action” alternative in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) 2008 Supplemental EIS for Yucca Mountain, which was submitted to NRC as part of the license application. DOE’s conclusion that constructing and operating a repository at Yucca Mountain is the preferred alternative under NEPA is no longer supported by DOE’s and NRC’s own NEPA analyses. This paper reviews the developments that led up to the NRC’s new “Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel” Rule, beginning with the adoption in 1980 of the former “Waste Confidence Rule”.

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Report and Recommendations

Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) now outnumber family practice doctors in the United States and are the principal providers of primary care to many communities. Recent growth of these professions has occurred amidst considerable cross-state variation in their regulation, with some states permitting autonomous practice and others mandating extensive physician oversight. I find that expanded NP and PA supply has had minimal impact on the office-based healthcare market overall, but utilization has been modestly more responsive to supply increases in states permitting greater autonomy. Results suggest the importance of laws impacting the division of labor, not just its quantity.

How Does Provider Supply and Regulation Influence Health Care Market? Evidence from Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants

Interstate migration in the United States has decreased steadily since the 1980s, but little is known about the causes of this decline. We show that declining migration is related to a concurrent secular decline in job changing. Neither trend is primarily due to observable demographic or socioeconomic factors. Rather, we argue that the decline in job changing has caused the decline in migration. After establishing a role for the labor market in declining migration, we turn to the question of why job changing has become less frequent over the past several decades. We find little support for several explanations, including the rise of dual-career households, the decline in middle-skill jobs, occupational licensing, and the need for employees to retain health insurance. Thus, the reasons for these dual trends remain opaque and should be explored further.

Job Changing and the Decline in Long-Distance Migration in the United States.

The competition rules and policy framework of the European Union represents an important institutional restriction for doing sports business. Driven by the courts, the 2007 overhaul of the approach and methodology has increased the scope of competition policy towards sports associations and clubs. Nowadays, virtually all activities of sports associations that govern and organize a sports discipline with business elements are subject to antitrust rules. This includes genuine sporting rules that are essential for a league, championship or tourna-ment to come into existence. Of course, ‘real’ business or commercial activities like ticket selling, marketing of broadcasting rights, etc. also have to comply with competition rules. Regulatory activities of sports associations comply with European competition rules if they pursuit a legitimate objective, its restrictive effects are inherent to that objective and proportionate to it. This new approach offers important orientation for the strategy choice of sports associations, clubs and related enterprises. Since this assessment is done following a case-by-case approach, however, neither a blacklist of anticompetitive nor a whitelist of procompetitive sporting rules can be derived. Instead, conclusions can be drawn only from the existing case decisions – but, unfortunately, this leaves many aspects open. With respect to business activities, the focus of European competition policy is on centralized marketing arrangements bundling media rights. These constitute cartels and are viewed to be anticompetitive in nature. However, they may be exempted from the cartel prohibition on efficiency and consumer benefits considerations. Here, a detailed list of conditions exists that centralized marketing arrangements must comply with in order to be legal. Although this policy seems to be well-developed at first sight, a closer look at the decision practice reveals several open problems. Other areas of the buying and selling behavior of sports associations and related enterprises are considerably less well-developed and do not provide much orientation for business. The author would like to thank Arne Feddersen and the participants of the 2nd European Conference on Sports Economics (German Sports University Co-logne, 2010) for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

The Institutional Framework for Doing Sports Business: Principles of EU Competition Policy in Sports Markets

In this paper, we analyze the development of occupational regulation of massage therapists in the United States as well as the effects of state licensing and certification on their earnings and numbers. Our results suggest that massage therapists working in states with licensing receive an earnings premium of as much as 16.2 percent. We also find some evidence that licensing seems to reduce the number of massage therapists. We find less convincing evidence that certification has had similar effects. We argue that, taken together, our results suggest that licensing restricts entry at the expense of consumers and that its effects are less likely to be explained by other competing factors.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667840

Licensing One of the World's Oldest Professions: Massage

There is concern that licensure requirements impede mobility of licensed professionals to areas of high demand. Nursing has not been immune to this criticism, especially in the context of perceived nurse shortages and large expected future demand. The Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) was introduced to solve this problem by permitting registered nurses to practice across state lines without obtaining additional licensure. We exploit the staggered adoption of the NLC to examine whether a reduction in licensure-induced barriers alters the nurse labor market. Using data on over 1.8 million nurses and other health care workers we find no evidence that the labor supply or mobility of nurses increases following the adoption of the NLC, even among the residents of counties bordering other NLC states who are potentially most affected by the NLC. This suggests that nationalizing occupational licensing will not substantially reduce labor market frictions.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

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Labor Supply Effects of Occupational Regulation: Evidence from the Nurse Licensure Compact

In The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork explored many of antitrust’s misadventures. Specifically, Bork severely criticized the Robinson-Patman Act, which he characterized as “antitrust’s least glorious hour.” In this paper, we explore Bork’s criticism of the Robinson-Patman Act along with those of other legal scholars and economists. We analyze the central prohibitions of the act and explore their competitive implications. We also show that the act’s unfortunate prohibitions have been muted by the antitrust agencies’ benign neglect and three recent Supreme Court decisions.

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“Antitrust’s Least Glorious Hour”: The Robinson-Patman Act

There is concern that state licensure requirements impede ecient mobility of licensed professionals to areas of high demand. Nursing has not been immune to this criticism, especially in light of persistent nurse shortages and large expected future demand. The Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) was introduced to solve this problem by permitting registered nurses to practice across state lines and making licensure easier to obtain for nurses moving between member states. We exploit the staggered adoption of the NLC across states and over time to examine whether a reduction in licensure-induced barriers alters the nurse labor market. Using data on over 1.5 million nurses and other health care workers from the 1990 and 2000 Census and the 2006-2012 American Community Surveys, we estimate the eects of NLC adoption on commuting patterns and labor force outcomes. We specically examine whether NLC adoption is associated with a greater likelihood of cross-state commuting, an increase in commuting times, and changes to employment and labor force participation. Our results indicate no eect

State Regulation and the Mobility of Nurses: An Examination of the Nurse Licensure Compact

The 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines set forth the current antitrust enforcement practices but do not address mergers that result in bilateral monopoly. We show that, given the presence of lawful, enduring market power, such mergers may improve social welfare. As a result, these mergers deserve careful scrutiny before condemning them as anticompetitive. In this paper, we address this issue and suggest an economically sound enforcement policy.

Considerations of Countervailing Power

In his classic article, Walter Oi (Oi, Q. J. Econ. 2005; 85: 77–96) analyzed the optimal structure of a two-part tariff. He showed that identical consumer demands result in user fees equal to marginal cost and a lump-sum entry fee equal to the consumer surplus that marginal cost pricing generates. This result appears in managerial economics texts (Managerial Economics (6th edn). W. W. Norton: New York; 472–475; Managerial Economics and Business Strategy (5th edn). McGraw Hill/Irwin: New York; 410–412) and intermediate microeconomics texts (Intermediate Microeconomics (6th edn). W. W. Norton: New York; 451–453). In this note, we extend Oi’s analysis to the case of uncertainty. We show that attitudes toward risk influence the optimal two-part tariff. The results from our model describe the two-part tariff that emerges from expected utility maximization. Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Christina DePasquale

Papers

Labor Supply Effects of Occupational Regulation: Evidence from the Nurse Licensure Compact

“Antitrust’s Least Glorious Hour”: The Robinson-Patman Act

State Regulation and the Mobility of Nurses: An Examination of the Nurse Licensure Compact

Considerations of Countervailing Power

A note on two‐part pricing under uncertainty