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,...

A series of recent judicial setbacks has rapidly elevated the role of economic analysis and economists at the SEC. I discuss key organizational responses following the 2011 D.C. Circuit decision in Business Roundtable v. SEC. Significantly greater resources were allocated to the SEC's Division...

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...

Following a number of high-profile judicial setbacks, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has devoted considerable resources towards enhancing its economic analyses in support of rulemaking activities. An ensuing discussion has emerged among academics, policymakers, and regulators...

Delays in obtaining development approvals have been advanced as a major reason for shortages if not also increase in cost of housing. This paper is the first systematic attempt to examine whether the apparently long period of time taken to obtaining statutory planning permissions by developers...

How does the scope of review affect bureaucratic policymaking incentives? To explore this ques-tion, I consider a simple policymaking environment in which an expert agency develops policythat is upheld or overturned by an overseer who may have different policy goals. The agencycan affect the...