Roger Noll, emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, will deliver the 2006 AEI-Brookings Joint Center Distinguished Lecture on why regulatory reform has stalled and why certain costly regulatory practices are spreading to the rest of the world. He will discuss how politics can block beneficial reforms of regulations that do little more than protect incumbents and prevent competition. He will also examine why so many countries ignore the costs of suppressing competition and, instead, create regulated monopolies when privatizing state-owned enterprises.