The Empty Call for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Financial Regulation

Jeffrey N. Gordon

The Journal of Legal Studies, 2014, vol. 43, issue S2, S351 - S378

Abstract: The call for benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in financial regulation misunderstands the origins and utility of BCA as a guide to administrative rule making. Benefit-cost analysis imagines an omniscient social planner who can calculate costs and benefits from a natural system that generates prices (costs and benefits) that do not change (or change much) no matter what the central planner does. For example, the toxicity of chemicals, the health hazards of emissions, the statistical value of life--these do not change in response to health-and-safety regulation. For the financial sector, however, the system that generates costs and benefits is constructed by financial regulation itself and the subsequent processes of adaptation and regulatory arbitrage. An important new rule will change the system beyond our calculative powers. Instead of weighing costs and benefits, financial regulation necessarily is based on a series of trade-offs of normatively derived values, which may entail principles of pragmatic design.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/678332 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/678332 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/678332

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Legal Studies from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().