Does Regulation Kill Jobs?

This book, edited by Cary Coglianese, Adam Finkel, and Christopher Carrigan, is out. My copy arrived and I have been paging through it. I became interested in this topic several years ago, and wrote a paper with Jonathan Masur arguing that regulators should monetize the expected costs from job loss caused by proposed regulations when they conduct cost-benefit analyses. Agencies have never done this, perhaps because in standard economic models, a job loss is not actually a social cost–the unemployed worker just gets another job, or capital shifts to a less regulated sector of the economy where new people are hired. But recent empirical work suggested that the social costs of a job loss could be high–in the neighborhood of $100,000–because human capital is destroyed, among other effects.

So we wrote this paper and were subsequently invited to participate in this conference, where a very strong group of people delivered papers collected in this book. Many papers dealt with the important but age-old question of whether regulation itself destroys jobs (maybe). I was more interested in whether people thought it would make sense for regulators to treat job loss as a cost in cost-benefit analysis . It looks like a maybe-to-yes with a great deal of cautious skepticism. One worry, which is a real one, is that agencies just can’t handle it. Agencies aren’t very rigorous in their existing cost-benefit methodology, and requiring them to look at job-loss effects may be too much. Still, I hope to see some experimentation in government. OIRA asked for comments on this topic a while back; I don’t know if anything came of it. There will be resistance from people who fear that our approach would reduce the amount of regulation.