Quantifying the Impacts of Regulation

The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs recently released new rules that will be used to quantify and evaluate proposed new regulations. Many economists have been arguing for this change for a decade and believe that the new formulas are more accurate. There are several important changes to the new scoring methodology, notably that the new formulas give more value to future impacts of regulation. Critics of the new formulas argue that the new regulations are a way to impose high regulatory costs today that are justified by some theoretical future benefit. Other economists counter that it’s important not to ignore future benefits or risks that are known and understood. This kind of government analysis has been routinely conducted for decades, but the public rarely even gets a peek at the results of the analysis. I would love to know how economists quantify the societal benefits from something like the Affordable Connectivity Plan that provides broadband discounts to low-income families. I would love to understand how government economists would quantify the impact of providing more unlicensed spectrum compared to selling licensed spectrum to the big wireless carriers. It would be intriguing if the public (or at least folks like me) could more routinely see the results of such analysis.