This is a substantially revised, refocused, and updated version of an earlier draft paper, exploring the significant role Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) plays in facilitating or impeding legislative and regulatory policy decisions. The paper centers around three case studies of CBAs EPA prepared...

Environmental, health, and safety advocates, say Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, have been wrongly hostile to cost-benefit analysis because of a false belief that it is biased against regulation. The bias against regulation, while real, has been the artifact of historical accident - the...

The view that intergenerational distributive justice and efficiency should be treated separately is familiar, yet controversial. This article elaborates the often-implicit justifications for separate treatment and provides a more express statement of how and when such treatment is appropriate....

Although government agencies increasingly use behavioral irrationalities as a justification for government intervention, the paradox is that these same government policies are also subject to similar behavioral inadequacies across a broad range of policies. This article develops an analysis of...

The social discount rate used in cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is an interest rate applied to benefits and costs that are expected to occur in the future in order to convert them into a present value. This conversion is done to ascertain what those benefits and costs are worth today. The social...

The aim of this paper is to call for the need of a theoretical model of pharmaceutical products safety in which the two systems of regulation and liability operate complementarily. The question is why two legal tools that are meant to achieve and protect the same goal (protection of consumers)...

In the United States insurance is regulated both by state insurance commissions and class action litigation. The interaction of these two systems has not been extensively studied. We examine four different facets of the regulation litigation tradeoff. The first is to examine whether a...

This Article proposes a new method of reducing the costs administrative agencies incur in monitoring regulatory compliance by a firm that operates multiple sources of risk, such as air-polluting smokestacks. The expense of individually monitoring such sources directly may consume a large share...

The free public services doctrine (also known as the municipal cost recovery rule) states that a government entity may not recover from a tortfeasor the costs of public services occasioned by the tortfeasor's wrongdoing. This article traces the history of the doctrine and argues for its...

The United States has long suffered from a schizophrenia about energy policy. The importance of one of the factors in energy policy, the environment, has never been formally defined. Climate change adds another distinct layer to this complexity, as neither energy policies nor environmental...