We take for granted that the basic choice in public policy is between allocation of resources by government bureaucracy, on the one hand, or allocation by markets, on the other. But that dichotomy is false, and at least under contemporary circumstances it is more accurate to describe the choice...

This paper, written for a Conference on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Financial Regulation held at the University of Chicago in October 2013, analyzes the institutional framework that has historically governed the CBA of financial regulation. Although U.S. financial regulators are often...

Cost-benefit analysis of financial regulation (CBA/FR) has become a flashpoint in contemporary legal and political debates, partly due to the Dodd-Frank Act. Yet debates over CBA/FR exhibit terminological confusion, and CBA/FR advocacy has outrun the possible, given data limitations and current...

Many regulators have concluded that cost-benefit analysis is the best available method for capturing the welfare effects of regulations. It is therefore understandable that in recent years, some people have been interested in requiring financial regulators to engage in careful cost-benefit...

The problem of nonquantifiability is a recurrent one in both public policy and ordinary life. Much of the time, we cannot quantify the benefits of potential courses of action, or the costs, or both, and we must nonetheless decided whether and how to proceed. Under existing Executive Orders,...

If policymakers could measure the actual welfare effects of regulations, and if they had a properly capacious sense of welfare, they would not need to resort to cost-benefit analysis, which gives undue weight to some values and insufficient weight to others. Surveys of self-reported well-being...

In diverse areas – from retirement savings, to fuel economy, to prescription drugs, to consumer credit, to food and beverage consumption – government makes personal decisions for us or helps us make what it sees as better decisions. In other words, government serves as our agent. Understood...

When people make decisions on behalf of others, there is a risk that they would prioritize their own interests over those they are supposed to promote. According to common wisdom, transparency and accountability are the best cure for this problem. This Article argues, counterintuitively, that...

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the...

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the...