Regulating markets

Course goals

After completing this course, the student:

• has an understanding of the various ways in which markets are regulated in the EU;
• is familiar with a number of approaches that are used to analyse market regulation in economics, law and political science/public administration;
• is able to apply these approaches to concrete cases of market regulation in the EU;
• is able to identify the trade-offs that arise when applying political, economic and legal principles to regulatory problems;
• is able to integrate insights from these three disciplines to find balanced solutions to regulatory problems.
• is able to report on the analysis of market regulation issues in a clear, systematic and concise way.

Content

Regulation is one of the main ways (if not: the main way) in which the EU seeks to intervene in markets. By developing and setting regulatory standards, EU policy-makers try to steer the outputs of markets, and the way in which they work, towards certain desired objectives.
 
Market regulation raises a range of important economic, legal and political-administrative questions:

• Since regulation intervenes in and tries to steer markets, it is fundamentally related to economic processes. Economic insights are therefore indispensable for analysing the ways in which different forms of regulation work (or do not work).
• Regulation is, by nature, a legal type of intervention. Even when forms of private (as opposed to public) regulation are used, they are embedded in legal regimes and raise legal questions.
• Since regulation is a form of governance, and a way to balance different interests, it is a highly political exercise, in which different stakeholders and interests play a role.

 
In this course, we will study forms of market regulation from an economic, legal and political-administrative angle, with a view to (1) analysing the implications of different regulatory arrangements and (2) developing well-founded solutions to regulatory problems.