Filtered by author: On Balance Blog Editor Clear Filter

On Balance: 120 Million Crimes in the US in 2017 Imposed Losses Valued at $2.6 Trillion: First Estimates of Total Costs in 25 Years

Benefit-cost analyses of criminal justice policies, early childhood education, at-risk youth programs, and other interventions that reduce crime have moved beyond the academic arena into applications by both state and federal policy makers (Welsh, Farrington, & Gowar, 2015). Despite this growing interest in benefit-cost analysis, our recent article in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Miller, Cohen, Swedler, Ali, & Hendrie, 2021), provides the first estimates in 25 years of the numbers and total costs of crime against individuals in the US. 

 

Read More

On Balance: What Should OIRA Do about Equity, Justice, Dignity and Moral Responsibility?

On his first day in office, President Biden issued a memorandum titled “Modernizing Regulatory Review,” directing the director of the Office of Management and Budget to produce a set of recommendations for how to improve regulatory review. 

Read More

On Balance: Benefit-Cost Lessons Learned

An important lesson from the Trump days is how a robust cost-benefit analysis helps an agency both defend itself in court and guard against future rollbacks. But agencies must also ensure that they finalize any big policies in time to have the rules reviewed in court before the next transition, which means that there is no time to waste. These competing demands put huge pressures on agencies in a new administration. These lessons also highlight significant opportunities.

Read More

On Balance: Measuring Social Welfare

Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction (Oxford University Press 2019) is an overview of the “social welfare function” (SWF) framework for policy analysis. The book covers the underlying theory of SWFs in some detail, here drawing upon both welfare economics and the philosophical literature on well-being and distributive justice. Measuring Social Welfare also demonstrates how SWFs can be used as a practical policymaking tool. One chapter of the book offers a detailed study of the use of SWFs, as compared to benefit-cost analysis (BCA), with respect to fatality risk regulation. (Adler 2019, ch. 5)

Read More

On Balance: Integrating Economics and Epidemiology in the COVID-19 Context (1 of 4)

One of the most popular sessions at the SBCA 2021 Annual Conference was on combining economics and epidemiology to understand COVID-19. Session speaker Chris Avery shares a brief statement below.

Thomas Schelling suggested in his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior that cost-benefit choices by individuals can explain the emergence of population-level phenomena in a game theory model. We can apply Schelling’s binary choice framework to social distancing.

Read More

On Balance: Integrating Economics and Epidemiology in the COVID-19 Context (2 of 4)

One of the most popular sessions at the SBCA 2021 Annual Conference was on combining economics and epidemiology to understand COVID-19. Session speaker Natalie Dean shares a brief statement below.

Past studies of Ebola, HIV, dengue, and Zika by infectious disease epidemiologists provide a road map for the use of outbreak and contact tracing data to estimate transmission parameters for application in mathematical models. There are several primary goals for modeling efforts in this context.

Read More

On Balance: Integrating Economics and Epidemiology in the COVID-19 Context (3 of 4)

One of the most popular sessions at the SBCA 2021 Annual Conference was on combining economics and epidemiology to understand COVID-19. Session speaker Bill Bossert shares a brief statement below. 

Epidemic models often generate new terms or phrases to describe their behavior. Two of these, “herd immunity” and ”flattening the curve”, have been widely misunderstood and misused in the COVID epidemic by media, policy makers and even epidemiologists, who should know better. They have been held up as goals of public health management, but there is a deep down-side of each. Achieving herd immunity is just reducing the number of susceptible hosts for the pathogen to the point that the chance of an infected individual contacting a susceptible to transmit the pathogen isN too small to support the persistence of the disease. This is achieved at the cost of terrible human suffering or by vaccination that is measurably costly and it is difficult to achieve adequately high vaccination rates. Flattening the curve just trades acute pain for chronic pain. Reducing peak suffering and health care cost is replaced by an extended period for each, with only very small reduction in summed morbidity and cost. It can allow more time for the evolution of new strains that might be less sensitive to established therapies or vaccines.

Read More

On Balance: Integrating Economics and Epidemiology in the COVID-19 Context (4 of 4)

One of the most popular sessions at the SBCA 2021 Annual Conference was on combining economics and epidemiology to understand COVID-19. Session speaker Ellie Murray shares a brief statement below. 

Public health responses to epidemics have been developed and refined over more than five centuries of experience. In recent decades, thirteen new zoonotic infections that affect humans, from Ebola in 1976 to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2012, have emerged. Based on these experiences, the CDC Field Epidemiology Manual lays out a clear set of steps for outbreak investigation and response, including the importance of communicating clearly with the public. In countries and regions where time-tested public health tools based on these steps have been used, COVID is largely under control.

Read More

On Balance: Extending the Domain of the Value of a Statistical Life

The value of a statistical life (VSL) serves as the linchpin in the evaluation of prospective risk and environmental regulations. The estimated rate of tradeoff between fatality risks and money provides the basis for government agencies to monetize mortality risk reductions. For several decades, the VSL has been solidly entrenched in the benefit components of regulatory impact analyses. Recently, U.S. government agencies have used VSL estimates between $9 million and $11 million to estimate the prospective benefits for each expected death that is prevented by government regulations. The VSL sets the efficient price for small changes in risk, which is an efficiency reference point that has general applicability.

Read More

On Balance: Prospects for Regulatory Analysis in the Biden Administration

President Biden's regulatory-reform calls for an updating of OMB Circular A-4, the obscure technical guidance that governs how regulatory agencies perform benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and how OMB reviews agency analyses.  Here are some issues ripe for reconsideration, as A-4 has not been updated since 2003.

Read More

On Balance: Averting Expenditures and Willingness to Pay for Electricity Supply Reliability

The objective of the electricity transmission project is to increase domestic electricity consumption by improving the availability and reliability of electricity in Nepal’s electricity grid. This investment is to be financed through a grant from the US government via the Compact between the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Government of Nepal at a proposed cost of US$ 530 million. In addition, the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) is in the process of undertaking a number of generation projects with a total cost of approximately US$ 350 million, facilitated by funding of US$ 150 million from the Asian Development Bank and several bilateral development assistance organizations. Hence, the total investment program for system improvement is approximately US$ 880 million.

Read More

On Balance: Systems Analysis, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, Benefit-Cost Analysis, and Government Decisions

Rob Moore invited me to share further reflections on BCA in practice, lessons from 50 years ago but still relevant today.

 

Read More

On Balance: Value of Improved Information about Environmental Protection Values: Toward a Benefit–Cost Analysis of Public-Good Valuation Studies

Environmental valuation has over the last 40 years grown into a major field within environmental and resource economics. Sizable resources are every year put into environmental valuation work, and an entire industry of analysts is devoted to it. There is however little discussion of benefits versus costs of these studies. A small part of them are innovative and part of fundamental research, and should clearly be funded, and published. But by far most valuation studies are much more practical and aim to assess particular goods or policies with less general interest to the broader public. Their usefulness should therefore be scrutinized.

 

Read More

On Balance: Community-Led Total Sanitation: Incorporating Results from Recent Evaluations

The evidence access to safe sanitation services is essential for reducing child mortality and improving public health is overwhelming (Mara et al. 2010 & Prüss-Ustün et al. 2019). The international public health and medical communities have reached a consensus that access to sanitation services is a priority. Readers of the British Medical Journal voted the “sanitary revolution” as the most significant medical achievement since 1840 (Ferriman 2007). The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals both include explicit targets for increasing access to sanitation services. Despite overwhelming support for promoting sanitation in low-income countries, however, the problem remains large as an estimated 4.2 billion people worldwide are using inadequate sanitation facilities and almost 700 million have no access to any sanitation (UNICEF and WHO 2020). 

 

Read More

On Balance: How Irrationality Affects the Value of Cash Transfers

Financial transfers from taxpayers to program recipients (such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, in the US), are treated as having no effect on net benefits in benefit cost analysis, because, in dollar terms, the benefit they generate for recipients is exactly offset by the cost to taxpayers.  But if poverty has the effect of reducing the rationality of recipients relative to taxpayers, and if getting out of poverty increases it, then transfers may actually generate a non-zero net benefit, which could be positive or negative. 

Read More

On Balance: "Right Enough" Numbers for Air Pollution Policy

Exposure to air pollution continues to be a major health risk, including worsening health risks related to COVID-191. Thus, accounting for these benefits of these avoided health risks is critical in the evaluation of policies that focus on improving air quality and also play an important role in the anticipated climate policies, where improving air quality should be considered as a major co-benefit. However, compared to the scrutiny that has been given to the relationship between exposure to air pollution and adverse health effects, modeling the transport and fate of air pollutants from the emission source to the ambient concentrations to which we are exposed is often given more limited consideration in the modeling chain from emissions to monetary valuation for air pollutants. 

 

Read More

On Balance: Efficiency without Apology: Consideration of the Marginal Excess Tax Burden and Distributional Impacts in Benefit–Cost Analysis

An important and difficult issue in benefit-cost analysis is how to deal with the distributional impacts of policies. An approach to this issue is described in a recent article published in the fall 2020 issue of the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis by Anthony Boardman, Aidan Vining, David Weimer, and me. This blog summarizes our analysis.

Read More

On Balance: When All Lives Matter Equally: Equity Weights for BCA by Combining the Economics of VSL and US Policy

If the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) is observed to be a function of income and policy fixes VSL as a constant, then policy has defined welfare weights over income.

Few topics are as controversial between the public and benefit-cost analysts as placing a value on a statistically lost or shortened life, the VSL.  Recent public discourse and civil unrest are in part driven by whether some classes of lives matter more than others.  Yet with the dry logic of economists it is possible to combine evidence based VSLs that change with income, the less money you have the lower the VSL, with the public policy VSL that is chosen to be constant. 

Read More

On Balance: Handbook on Wellbeing, Happiness, and the Environment

Happiness Economics (HE) is concerned with the utility consequences of economic choices, while Experimental Economics (EE) studies choice behavior. Both HE and EE are branches of Behavioral Economics (BE) and they often lead to similar conclusions, which are at odds with assumptions of the Standard Economic Model (SEM). In the SEM the decisions maker maximizes a utility function with complete, transitive and self-regrading preferences, which are affected only by the levels of one’s own payoffs (the payoffs of other individuals and other generations are not considered). The SEM has no ethical underpinnings and no distributional concerns. For many economists, as well as scientists from other disciplines that endeavor to develop interdisciplinary frameworks and systems, which include socio-economic considerations, the SEM is unsatisfactory.

 

Read More

On Balance: Forming Covid-19 Policy under Uncertainty

In a recent paper in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Manski, 2020), I observed that formation of COVID-19 policy must cope with many uncertainties about the nature of the disease, the dynamics of the pandemic, and behavioral responses. I noted that these uncertainties have been well-recognized qualitatively but not satisfactorily characterized quantitatively. I argued that credible measurement of uncertainties would improve prediction of policy impacts and promote reasonable policy decisions.

 

Read More