Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Regulation

This article presents recent methodological innovations in the area of cost and benefit assessment of government regulation, in both a prospective and a retrospective sense. The focus of this review is mostly limited to the United States and from the Economics discipline's perspective. Much of the extant progress in measurement has occurred on the front of private costs of compliance. Private benefits, social costs, and social benefits remain much less systematically organized and more arduous to quantitatively assess, mostly due to the difficulty of standardizing partial and general equilibrium counterfactuals. We offer a discussion on potential future methodological improvements in cost–benefit analysis.