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...

The standard form of electoral system in the United States — plurality voting with one person, one vote — suffers from countless defects, most of which stem from its failure to enable people to register the intensity of their preferences for political outcomes when they vote. Quadratic...

Donald Trump campaigned as a populist but how can a populist who blames the “establishment” for the country's failures, rule, when the government bureaucracy is itself a creature of the establishment? The answer that appears to be emerging is a “personalist” style of leadership that may...

Recent scholarship has shown that institutional investors may cause softer competition among product market rivals because of their significant ownership stakes in competing firms in concentrated industries. However, while calls for litigation against them under Section 7 of the Clayton Act are...

Default on sovereign debt is a form of political risk. Issuers and creditors have responded to this risk both by strengthening the terms in sovereign debt contracts that enable creditors to enforce their debts judicially and by creating terms that enable sovereigns to restructure their debts....

Cost-benefit analysis is routinely used by government agencies in order to evaluate projects, but it remains controversial among academics. The standard defense appeals to the Pareto standard or the Kaldor-Hicks standard, and assumes that agencies should respect people's actual preferences, as...

Over the past two years U.S. regulatory agencies have issued fourteen regulations that take into account the effect of industrial activities and products on the global climate. The regulatory activity so far has already set precedents on which future regulation will rest. Yet despite the...

This paper analyzes cost-benefit analysis from legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives. The traditional defense of cost-benefit analysis is that it maximizes a social welfare function that aggregates unweighted and unrestricted preferences. We follow many economists and philosophers who...

Diverse measures are used as proxies for judicial ability, ranging from the college and law school a judge attended to the rate at which her decisions are cited by other judges. Yet, there has been little serious examination of which of these ability measures is better or worse at predicting the...