Many statutes are administered by administrative agencies. This paper shows that, when interpreting an ambiguous statute, administrative agencies choose between two strategies of statutory interpretation: the risky strategy - a relatively aggressive interpretation that provokes an appeal by the...

Some of the most interesting discussions of cost-benefit analysis focus on exceptionally difficult problems, including catastrophic scenarios, “fat tails,” extreme uncertainty, intergenerational equity, and discounting over long time horizons. As it operates in the actual world of government...

The paper introduces the concepts of incentive relation and implementation relation, discussing them in the context of agent-principal relationships. The incentives literature relevant to implementation is reviewed, as well as relevant literature on individual behavior in organizations and on...

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...

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...

Many people have wondered why the US government conducts cost-benefit analysis with close reference to the value of a statistical life (VSL). It is helpful to answer that question by reference to the “Easy Cases,” in which those who benefit from regulatory protection must pay for it. In such...

When an agency fails to engage in quantitative cost-benefit analysis, has it acted arbitrarily and hence in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act? At first glance, the question answers itself: Congress sometimes requires that form of analysis, but if it has not done so, then agencies...

This paper studies welfare maximizing allocation of indivisible objects to ex-ante identical agents in the absence of monetary transfers. The agents, each with a unit demand, share a common ranking of the objects, and are privately informed about their own valuations. The structure of the...

We study the problem of a regulator who must control the emissions of a given pollutant from a series of industries when the firms' abatement costs are unknown. We develop a mechanism in which the regulator asks firms to report their abatement costs and implements the most stringent emissions...