During the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, the government bailed out numerous corporations, including banks, investment banks, and automobile manufacturers. While the bailouts helped end the financial crisis, they were intensely controversial at the time, and were marred by the...

Politicians and commentators have from time to time proposed that regulations be suspended or delayed during recessions because of their adverse impact on employment. We evaluate this argument from within a macroeconomic framework. We argue that a case can be made for what we call...

Regulatory agencies are required to perform cost-benefit analysis of major rules. However, in many cases regulators refuse to report a monetized value for the benefits of a rule that they issue. Sometimes, they report no monetized value; at other times, they report a monetized value but also...

Financial regulators should use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to evaluate financial regulations. Finance is an ideal domain for CBA because the direct costs and benefits of financial activity can be easily monetized, and a huge amount of data exists for calculating the relevant valuations. John...

In an earlier article, Regulation, Unemployment, and Cost-Benefit Analysis, we argued that regulatory agencies should incorporate the costs of unemployment into cost-benefit analyses of proposed regulations. We argued that alternatives to including unemployment costs in cost-benefit analysis —...

This paper builds on contributions to a Conference on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Financial Regulation, held at the University of Chicago, to show how benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of financial regulations should be conducted. Our major themes are that (1) on theoretical grounds, BCA should be easier...