Science AI Journal
Business, Management and Accounting · Research topic

Open research questions in Regulation and Compliance Studies

39 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,937 Regulation and Compliance Studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • The PFAS experience exposes limitations in both systems when addressing widespread contamination from substances whose environmental persistence and health effects were not understood until decades after deployment, demonstrating the need for adaptable frameworks that balance comprehensive cleanup with fair treatment of historical actors.

    Who pays for PFAS contamination? A comparative analysis of environmental liability in the US and Sweden · 2026 · DOI

  • Drawing on 35 semi-structured interviews with participants across the fair lending ecosystem, we find that while financial institutions have a floor of fairness practices aimed at preventing discrimination in lending largely absent in other domains, the specifics of how firms test for discrimination and search for less discriminatory algorithms varies widely.

    The Fair Lending Model: How the Longest-Running Algorithmic Fairness Programs Work in Practice · 2026

  • Although we provide mixed evidence around changes in total environmental disclosure in response to peer lawsuits, we offer robust evidence that firms provide more forward-looking (and less historical) environmental disclosures in their conference calls in response to peers’ environmental disclosure lawsuits.

    Does Litigation Risk Shape Environmental Disclosure Decisions? Evidence from Peers’ Environmental Disclosure Lawsuits · 2025 · DOI

  • Through this conceptualization, this paper argues that corporate accountability remains elusive because of corporate actors’ normative power and influence in the BHR norm contestation.

    Norm Contestation in the BHR Field—The Role of Corporate Actors as Entrepreneurs, Antipreneurs, and Saboteurs · 2024 · DOI

  • However, research on stakeholder perspectives is lacking, and assessing trustworthiness is difficult due to ‘responsibility gaps’ where it is unclear where responsibility for harms arising from AS ought to lie.

    Regulating for trustworthy autonomous systems: exploring stakeholder perspectives on answerability · 2024 · DOI

  • Unlike financial audits, ESG assurance varies widely in form and substance, including the choice of metrics assured, the level of assurance, and assuror identity.

    ESG assurance in the United States · 2024 · DOI

  • Findings also suggest that there is lack of consensus on regulatory enforcement, severe challenges in the flow of information and insufficient resources, which together form a contradictory regulatory regime based on trust between regulators and regulatees, on the one hand, and underlying assumptions of foul play, on the other.

    Regulatory voids in the prevention of environmental crime in Finland · 2021 · DOI

  • I also review limited evidence from overseas on 'Say on Pay', recently proposed in the US, which would allow nonbinding shareholder votes on CEO compensation.

    How Much Sunlight Does it Take to Disinfect a Boardroom? A Short History of Executive Compensation Regulation in America · 2009 · DOI

  • 1Yet, questions concerning the self-regulatory potential of the enterprise are not limited to the corporate governance debate: They also surface in modest guise even within the existing framework of corporate regulation, a framework that relies primarily on corporate profit seeking under external legal constraints.

    Corporate Liability Strategies and the Costs of Legal Controls · 1984 · DOI

  • Morgan’s fussy leadership doubtless did little to alleviate the dullness of this kind of research, and it is tempting to conclude that some of the men who remained at the CRL for some years did so because reasonable alternative employment was scarce.

    Government Laboratories and the Influence of Organized Scientists · 1971 · DOI

  • While the Act introduced significant procedural advancements, meaningful governance accountability will remain elusive absent deeper reforms targeting independence criteria…

    CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OR CORPORATE THEATER? A Critical Appraisal of Board Independence and Minority Shareholder Protections under the Companies Act 2013 · 2026 · DOI

  • issues Future research should focus on empirical studies and regulatory practitioners, as well as case studies of specific regulatory contexts.

    Environmental Compliance in the Era of Big Data: Perspectives from Regulatory Lawyers · 2026 · DOI

  • It ultimately argues that, although success at trial in such cases remains elusive, litigation is a useful and potentially growing tool for holding companies to their word regarding human rights claims.

    Litigating Corporate Human Rights Information · 2023 · DOI

  • Yet there is a sharp disconnect between the political importance of the jobs question and the limited research on the job effects of policy and general skepticism in the academic literature about the importance of those job effects for the costs and benefits of environmental regulation.

    Jobs and Environmental Regulation · 2020 · DOI

  • A rhetorical perspective also fills an important gap in sociological studies of “co-production” that claim that procedural deliberation enhances the legitimacy of regulation but underemphasize the role of quantification when procedural rules are lacking.

    Rhetorical Metrics Building Securities Regulation in America’s Era of Booms and Busts, 1890-1940 · 2019 · DOI

  • Inspectorates and enforcement agencies increasingly depend on information from societal actors to detect and enforce business offenses, but little is known about the factors underlying external reporting.

    Why External Witnesses Report Organizational Misconduct to Inspectorates: A Comparative Case Study in Three Inspectorates · 2018 · DOI

  • To file this gap in the literature, this paper develops an organizational political economy perspective to advance our understanding of how organizational and political‐legal arrangements affect parent companies' capacity to externalize their pollution costs to society.

    Organizational Political Economy and Environmental Pollution · 2015 · DOI

  • Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation.

    An Unlikely Alliance: How Experts and Industry Transformed Consumer Credit Policy in the Early Twentieth Century United States · 2015 · DOI

  • The two professions continue to resemble the traditional model in some respects but diverge from it in others, and on some points, there is insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion.

    Professional Self‐regulation in North America: The Cases of Law and Accounting · 2014 · DOI

  • Although existing studies uncovered how controversial policies are adopted across American States, little is known as to how regulatory policies are diffused that are technically complex and yet have low political salience.

    Building a Safe State · 2014 · DOI

  • Little is known about when and why these mechanisms constrain behavior by international organizations that runs counter to the mutual interests of states and civil society groups.

    Accountability in Global Governance: Civil Society Claims for Environmental Performance at the World Bank · 2014 · DOI

  • Inaction when regulation is warranted can put the public at continued and increasing risk of harm, but the failure of private enforcement to compel action reverberates beyond this harm to the interests of individuals.

    Intractable Delay and the Need To Amend the Petition Provisions of the FDCA · 2014

  • Informed by original New Zealand research on the vexed issue of industry standards and professionalism the article contends that the new regulatory framework is insufficiently comprehensive in scope to achieve its primary aims of raising standards and reducing risk.

    Governing private security in New Zealand · 2014 · DOI

  • The authors’ findings are important to business and society because they bridge the gap in knowledge about how voluntary compliance programs are supplemented by external monitoring and reporting for firms operating in the global environment.

    The Impact of External Monitoring and Public Reporting on Business Performance in a Global Manufacturing Industry · 2008 · DOI

  • Introduction In theory it is hard to deny the power of information revolutions to enhance environmental policy making, but in practice it remains to be seen whether governmental institutions are up to the task of making good use of this new information as it arises.

    Emerging Science, Adaptive Regulation, and the Problem of Rulemaking Ruts · 2008

Most-cited papers in Regulation and Compliance Studies

Most recent work

Find a gap in your own Regulation and Compliance Studies sub-topic

This page shows what the Regulation and Compliance Studies literature already flags as unresolved. To narrow it to your specific question, run the guided finder — it searches the gap library on demand and checks candidates against 250M+ OpenAlex works.

Open the Research Gap Finder →

Related topics in Business, Management and Accounting

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
652 open questions
Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences
453 open questions
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
337 open questions
Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
293 open questions
Environmental Sustainability in Business
211 open questions
Management and Organizational Studies
186 open questions
Customer Service Quality and Loyalty
174 open questions
International Business and FDI
159 open questions
39 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,937 Regulation and Compliance Studies papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

Tools for your next paper

Gaps & Literature SearchFind open questions in any field — 120,000+ open gaps mined from our own library.Pre-CheckIs your paper ready? A Tier 1–5 acceptance probability in seconds.Journal FinderA ranked shortlist of target journals from a 17,500-venue index.Duplicate Publication CheckerCheck prior-publication & salami-slicing risk across 8 sources.Citation GeneratorFreeA DOI or title → APA, MLA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS. No signup.Graphical Abstract MakerFreeTurn your findings into a colorblind-safe graphical abstract.

Compare the category — Honest roundups of the AI research tools, ours listed alongside the alternatives.

Command palette

Jump anywhere, run any action.