From Craig Thornton, Immediate Past President of the Society of Benefit-Cost Analysis:

Colleagues in the Administrative Law area:

In just over a month, the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis will hold its annual meeting. The meeting will be held online this year and so it will be easy to attend. There are a number of sessions pertaining to the use of benefit-cost analysis in regulation and regulatory decision making that I think you and your colleagues will find useful. In particular, I want to call your attention to the following session:

Four Years in Regulation: Benefits and Costs of Major Rules, 2017-2020

Chair: Clark Nardinelli, Past President, Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis

Presenters:

1. Susan Dudley, George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, Former OIRA Administrator
2. Dominic Mancini,  EOP/OMB, former Acting OIRA Administrator
3. Caroline Cecot, Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University
4. Stuart Shapiro, Rutgers University
5. Jonathan Wiener, J.D., Duke University School of Law and Sanford School of Public Policy

Abstract
In this roundtable, regulatory scholars and current and former OMB-OIRA officials will discuss the past four years in regulation.  A change in administration is always a good time to take stock of federal regulatory activity and its benefits and costs; with the end of the deregulatory policies of the last administration,  it’s time to assess the short and long run effects of those policies.  The starting place for the panel will be the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations. As the report shows, in fiscal years 2017-2019 federal agencies subject to Executive Order 12866 published 148 major rules. Many of these rules were transfer rules and many others were deregulatory, eliminating or revising regulations to generate what could be considered cost savings; cost savings from deregulation were defined in guidance on implementing EO 13771 and EO 13777. The panel will assess the benefits and costs and effectiveness of the past four regulatory years. The emphasis will be on the benefits and costs of the Trump regulatory program but the discussion will cover broader questions on the regulatory past and future, including the likely long-run effects of the regulatory policy of these years.

In addition, the conference will feature a number of important plenary sessions:

• Sustainable Recovery from Covid-19, Phoebe Koundouri, Athens University of Economics and Business, moderated by Dale Whittington with comments from Laura Taylor.
• Policy Choice under Uncertainty, with Application to Vaccination and Climate Policy, Charles Manski, Northwestern University, moderated by John Pepper with comments from Emma McIntosh and Robert Pindyck.
• Systems Analysis, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, Benefit-Cost Analysis, and Government Decisions, Alain Enthoven, Stanford University, moderated by Deborah Freund.
• , a conversation withTijen Arin, Stephen Hutton, Onil Banerjee, and Adrien Vogt-Schilb, moderated by Richard Damania.
• Benefit-Cost Analysis and U.S. Policy: The View from the White House, a conversation with Council of Economic Advisers members from the Obama and Bush administrations: Katharine G. Abraham, Katherine Baicker, and Donald Marron, moderated by Ann Wolverton.
• Integrating Economics and Epidemiology in the COVID-19 Context, a conversation with Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Natalie Dean, and Eleanor Murray, moderated by James K. Hammitt
• Nathaniel Hendren, Harvard University, moderated by Lisa A Robinson

To register for the conference or to get more information, you can go to the Society’s website: 2021 Annual Conference – Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.

I hope to see you there.

Craig Thornton, Immediate Past President, Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis