In recent years research on enforcement and deterrence has turned from an almost exclusive focus on policing and the criminal justice system to a consideration of the enforcement practices in regulatory and administrative agencies. As might be expected, the thrust of this work is directed to understanding enforcement strategies, their variation, and the properties associated with different patterns of compliance. In most of the work to date, the level of enforcement effort has been treated as a given, despite theoretical arguments that show the advantages of allowing enforcement intensity to vary in response to rates of compliance and considerable casual observation suggesting that enforcement agencies do indeed tailor their actions in light of the behavior of the objects of the regulation. This effort by Dr. Harrington and Kopp constitutes a significant step forward insofar as these investigators focus their energy on enforcement as a dynamic and interactive process. The goal of this project is to specify a simultaneous enforcement model, in which the probability of compliance, the inspection frequency, and the penalties assessed are determined endogenously, and apply it to examine the regulation of the nation's operating nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The model will not only permit consideration of the relationship between enforcement and compliance, but also the effects of other variables of interest on compliance, including technical variables such as plant size, utility- specific variables such as financial, health, or nuclear experience, and institutional variables. The data will come from NRC records on over 30,000 inspections that were conducted from 1976 to 1986, supplemented by data on individual plants and their situations including their record of civil penalties. Drs. Harrington and Kopp are testing their theory, developed in previous research, that past compliance affects future enforcement more often than not and is an adaptive process. This is a departure from most enforcement work which continues to assume that enforcement variables are predetermined and invariant over time. The research offers the prospect of empirical examination of a more complex theoretical approach to enforcement and compliance which will be an important scientific advance. In addition, the policy implications regarding safety issues at nuclear power plants will be useful as well since this project represents the first attempt to study the enforcement of NRC regulations statistically.
