- Paper on SSRN
- LPP Working Paper N° 3-2022. Second prize winner of LPP's Cost-Benefit Analysis Writing Competition (URL)
Abstract
In the United States, cost-benefit analysis plays a substantial role in government policy making in traditional regulatory areas, such as automobile safety and air quality. But the management of catastrophic risk has largely fallen outside the purview of cost-benefit analysis. The primary reasons that cost-benefit analysis has played a less important role in the context of catastrophic risks are procedural, rather than methodological. Although improvements can be made to cost-benefit analysis techniques to better account for catastrophic risks, the more important set of reforms—and the ones discussed in this proposal—are institutional.
