Designing Optimal Grandfathering Provisions in a Regulatory Context

The Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan think tank working to deliver economic and legal analysis in support of optimal policy implementation across many environmental issues. Policies and regulatory actions often include grandfathering clauses that either partly or fully exempt certain entities from complying with new regulations for a period of time. Due to the limited research available on the designs and impacts of grandfathering provisions, the Institute engaged a Capstone team to study their implementation and use across sectors. The team performed an extensive literature review, creating an informal database of grandfathering provisions for the Institute that captures differences in grandfathering features. The team utilized the database to develop proposed measures for classifying and evaluating the impacts of different grandfathering provisions, laying the foundation for a new avenue of scholarly work by the Institute and improved design of future regulations.