In their book The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles launch a new kind of debate over regulatory policy. Their focus is on regulations that confer benefits on existing businesses at the expense of would-be rivals and consumers. Specifically, they identify four major areas of “regressive regulation”—finance, intellectual property, occupational licensing, and land-use regulation—that stymie and distort competition while redistributing income and wealth up the socioeconomic scale.

The Niskanen Center’s regulatory policy department builds on Lindsey and Teles’s book with the Captured Economy project. The project and its companion website gather all major academic research as well as all the latest news on policy reform developments. By serving as a valuable one-stop-shop resource for both journalists and policymakers, the website promotes reform in specific policy areas and raises awareness of the larger background problems of regulatory capture and democratic dysfunction.