The Economics of Regulatory Tiering
分析监管分层（对大小企业区别对待）的经济学原理，证明在合规存在规模经济时，分层监管可能优于统一监管，并比较现有方案与帕累托最优方案的差距。
Many regulations impose lighter requirements on smaller firms than on largerfirms. Such differential treatment is known as tiering. This article presents a framework for analyzing tiering. It assumes that regulators use taxes to reduce negative externalities, that the collection of taxes imposes administrative costs on the taxedfirm and the regulatory agency, and that firm heterogeneity arises because firms have differential access to a scarce factor. The scarce factor is taken as managerial ability, although this identity is not essential for any of the results obtained. The article shows that when there are scale economies in regulatory compliance, tiered regulations may be Pareto-superior to untiered regulations under certain circumstances. It then compares existing tiering schemes with Pareto-efficient tiering schemes and suggests possible improvements in existing tiering schemes.