For over thirty years, all of my research has concentrated on aspects of executive government – its organization, capacities and limits, and some of the ideas and doctrines that surround the running and organization of government.

My early work, building on my graduate thesis on betting taxation, focused on government's implementation capacity, analysing instruments, forms of organization and types of policy context, and this research has formed the background to my later work on public management, regulation and public service reform.

Over the past decade or so most of my work has been focused on various aspects of regulation, including collaborative work with colleagues at LSE's Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, which I helped to found in 2001. Three of the projects I have been involved with over the past decade include

• an analysis of one of the UK's new quasi-independent regulators (OFTEL) created to oversee privatised utilities, which remains the only 'inside' account of the organizational working of such institutions. (See Telecommunications Regulation, by Clare Hall, Colin Scott and Christopher Hood, Routledge 1999),
• an analysis of the growth of regulation or regulation-like devices within UK government over a twenty-year period, which for the first time documented the resources invested in such activity over time and analysed the issues that surround it (See Regulation Inside Government, by Christopher Hood et al, OUP 1999),
• an analysis of the way that nine types of risk are regulated by the UK and EU, which developed a way of analysing risk regulation from a novel 'regime' perspective (See The Government of Risk, by Christopher Hood, Henry Rothstein and Robert Baldwin, OUP 2001).

The projects I am working on at present include

• a collaborative book with international colleagues on the development of controls over government in comparative perspective, scheduled to be completed in late 2003 and to be published by Edward Elgar in 2004,
• a collaborative book with Martin Lodge at CARR on the analysis of 'public service bargains' across a set of different states, to be completed in 2004 and to be published by Oxford University Press in 2005,
• work on the analysis of blame-avoidance, building on my inaugural lecture at Oxford university in November 2001, a version of which was published in Government and Opposition in 2002.