Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity and Ratliff-Rush closure

We establish strong relationships between the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity and the Ratliff-Rush closure of an ideal. Our results have several interesting consequences on the computation of the Ratliff-Rush closure, the stability of the Ratliff-Rush filtration, the invariance of the reduction number, and the computation of the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the Rees algebra and the fiber ring. In particular, we prove that the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the Rees algebra and of the fiber ring are equal for large classes of monomial ideals in two variables, thereby verifying a conjecture of Eisenbud and Ulrich for these cases.