📌 What This Paper Asks

When does a law actually produce a binding regulation? Congress frequently authorizes agencies to write rules, but agencies sometimes take years to act—or never act at all. The central argument is that the breadth of statutory delegation from Congress determines regulatory timing: explicit congressional commands produce fast rulemaking, while broad delegation hands timing power to other forces, especially internal agency considerations.

📊 Tracking Four Decades of Laws and Rules

• Nearly 350 statutes spanning four decades were collected and matched to thousands of subsequent regulations.
• The dataset links each statute to the universe of rules that could implement it, enabling direct measurement of how long agencies take to produce regulations (or whether they do so at all).

🔎 How the Argument Was Tested

• Innovative empirical methods were applied to the matched statute–regulation dataset to isolate the effect of delegation breadth on rulemaking speed.
• The analysis distinguishes statutes that explicitly instruct agencies to promulgate rules from statutes that grant broad policymaking discretion.

Key Findings

• When Congress expressly tells an agency to promulgate a rule, agencies tend to act quickly.
• When statutes provide greater policymaking discretion, regulatory timing is driven less by congressional direction and more by other factors—especially internal agency considerations.
• Empirical tests across the large matched dataset provide support for these theoretical expectations.

⚖️ Why This Matters

• Findings clarify when and why laws lead to regulatory action, improving understanding of delegation versus discretion in administrative governance.
• Results have implications for congressional drafting, administrative accountability, and efforts to predict or speed regulatory implementation.

Overall, the study deepens knowledge of the link between statutory delegation and regulatory timing, explaining both when regulation occurs and the mechanisms that determine how quickly agencies act.