In 2023, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance documents that specified new procedures for assessing prospective government regulations (Circular A-4) and economic policies more generally (Circular A-94). These revisions to long-standing guidance were not minor updates but shifted policy analyses from an efficiency-oriented perspective to a redistributive approach. OMB broadened the guidelines for reporting distributional consequences of policies and also specified how policy impacts on different income groups should be weighted. The weights assume that the social welfare function is governed by the sum of identical individual utility functions, each of which exhibits a substantial rate of diminishing marginal utility of income. The resulting weights provide a premium for households below the median-income level and a considerable penalty for those at higher-income levels. Application of the weights to property losses creates potentially substantial inefficiencies. If based on current empirical evidence on the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life rather than assuming that there is a complete offset of the weights, application of the weights to mortality risk valuation would generate inequities in protection.

Compromised kidney function is associated with an array of environmental contaminants and pathogens that may be considered for regulation. However, there are few valuation estimates for kidney effects for use in benefit–cost analyses, particularly willingness-to-pay estimates. This paper is one of several surveys valuing morbidity developed by the OECD Surveys to elicit Willingness-to-pay to Avoid Chemicals-related negative Health Effects project, which aims to improve the basis for benefit–cost analyses. We report the results of a stated preference survey valuing reduced the risk of symptomatic chronic kidney disease, filling an important gap in the valuation literature and addressing a need for applied benefits analysis of chemical regulation. The survey was administered to representative samples in each of 10 countries: Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The mean (median) WTP for an average reduction of 3.5 in 1,000 of the risk of serious kidney disease over 5 years is $2,609 ($764), corresponding to a mean (median) value per statistical case (VSC) of chronic kidney disease of $805,000 ($224,000). The mean VSC varies between $700,000 for Canada and $1,200,000 for Türkiye.

Using virtual reality (VR) in an experimental setting, we analyse how communicating more openly about a medical incident influences patients' feelings and behavioural intentions. Using VR headsets, participants were immersed in an actual hospital room where they were told by a physician that a medical incident had occurred. In a given scenario, half of the participants were confronted by a physician who communicated openly about the medical incident, while the other half were confronted with the exact same scenario except that the physician employed a very defensive communication strategy. The employed technology allowed us to keep everything else in the environment constant. Participants exposed to open disclosure were significantly more likely to take further steps (such as contacting a lawyer to discuss options and filing a complaint against the hospital) and express more feelings of blame against the physician. At the same time, these participants rated the physician's communication skills and general impression more highly than those who were confronted with a defensive physician. Nevertheless, communicating openly about the medical incident does not affect trust in the physician and his competence, perceived incident severity and likelihood of changing physician and filing suit.

Intentional violence against healthcare workers inflicts a physical and mental toll, motivating legislative proposals to better regulate these occupational risks. This article uses this context to address two novel issues for benefit assessment raised by injuries from assailants: potential heterogeneity in valuation based on the context of the injury risk and possible reductions in self-reported valuations when the exposed population has been trained to feel responsible for the risk. This article presents experimental evidence on workers’ preferences over the form of intervention: protection (risk reduction) or insurance (cost-sharing). The experiment also elicits worker valuations of occupational health care risks, calculating the value of a statistical injury (VSI), based on local wage-risk tradeoffs, in the general range of $200,000. Workers accord a premium to risk reductions that might eliminate the risk of injuries. Both the physical harm and the process by which the injury occurs may affect benefit assessments for the regulation of workplace violence. Non-healthcare participants require a $40,000 premium per expected injury resulting from intentional harm. While health care workers do not generally require such a premium, health care workers in clinical positions require more compensation to face occupational risks. Insurance coverage for monetary losses is more highly valued than protective measures for accidental harms, though there is no significant comparable preference for insurance against intentional harms. The results have important practical implications for addressing the concerning phenomenon of violence against healthcare workers, suggesting that expanding insurance compensation would be desirable, as would assigning an intentionality premium to intentional injuries.

The Biden administration has made equity a priority when issuing regulations, encouraging agencies to ensure that their regulations appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged groups. But scholarly examinations of agencies’ practices to date on understanding the distributional consequences of their regulations and on promoting equity have revealed significant gaps. In particular, agencies pay very little attention to the incidence of the costs of their regulations. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, rarely considers the incidence of regulatory costs among disadvantaged groups, despite being an agency that conducts relatively complete benefit–cost analyses and explicitly analyzes environmental justice implications of its regulations. But this cost-blindness is a mistake; it presents a missed opportunity to use the current equity-focused momentum to make real improvements for disadvantaged groups that could have long-lasting effects. This essay calls for agencies to give more attention to the incidence of regulatory costs in order to identify needs and opportunities for grants and investments to disadvantaged groups. This approach could provide much-needed direction for a program like the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative.

A uniform value of a statistical life (VSL) is part of established practice within the federal government. Some people have applauded a uniform VSL on the ground that it respects the equality of persons; takes harm to poor people as seriously as it does harm to wealthy people; avoids expressive harms; and builds appropriate wealth redistribution into regulatory policy. Other people have strenuously objected to a uniform VSL, emphasizing that to reduce mortality risks, poor people are willing to pay less than rich people are, and urging that poor people should not have to pay more than they are willing to pay. Whether a uniform VSL is in the interest of poor people depends on whether we are dealing with subsidies or regulations. In the case of subsidies, a uniform VSL is highly likely to benefit poor people. If we are dealing with regulations, we cannot know whether a uniform VSL helps or harms poor people without knowing the incidence of costs (and benefits).

Regulatory impact analyses of proposed environmental, occupational, and consumer product safety regulations often rely on a metric known as the Value per Statistical Case of Cancer (VSCC), that is, the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in the risk of developing cancer. In this paper, we ask whether the VSCC depends on cancer survival prospects. We develop a simple theoretical model that shows that under standard assumptions the VSCC is decreasing in the chance of surviving cancer. We empirically test this prediction by means of a stated preference survey, where we ask subjects aged 45–60 from the general population in the Czech Republic to report information about their WTP for reductions in the risk of getting cancer. One half of the sample was told that, if they got cancer, the 5-year survival rate was 60 % (corresponding to the average survival chances across all types of cancer), while the other half was told that it was 75 %. Consistent with the theoretical model, we find that the VSCC is larger in the former group. The ratio between the VSCC of the two groups is approximately equal to the ratio between the conditional cancer mortality risks implied by the survey’s survival rates, suggesting that the VSCC is proportional to conditional cancer mortality. Our findings have important policy implications in the context of regulations that focus on pollutants linked to cancers with different chances of survival.

In the absence of government safety regulation in the field of nanotechnology, ISO standards are being used as the basis for establishing technical and management guidelines at an international level. There are more than 50 current ISO standards on nanotechnology. Some of these relate to the working environment and occupational risk management. In Latin America, entities that are members of ISO are enunciating national versions of the international standards. In this article, this context is analysed critically, starting from the Mexican standard on occupational risk management in the working environment. Even though risk management standards may guarantee better and safer working conditions, in the field of nanotechnology, they simultaneously unlock detrimental implications for workers and society. Reliance on such private and voluntary forms of industry self-regulation is identified as a by-product of global neoliberalism.

This article considers a range of legal issues that arise when family and domestic violence impacts upon the workplace. It examines the available data on the costs of family and domestic violence to employers and the community. It discusses the potential for employers to be affected by Australian State and Territory criminal and related laws that are intended to protect a person from family and domestic violence. Recent cases of discrimination arising from family and domestic violence are considered with some speculations as to other possible forms of liability for employers concerning work health and safety and workers compensation laws. The Australian Fair Work Commission’s determination of unpaid family domestic violence leave is also examined, as is the adoption of paid leave by some State and Territory governments and larger Australian employers. The article concludes with some reflections and speculations on how current laws may affect employers and what actions can be taken by employers to adopt supportive measures to protect employees.

Environmental violation by enterprises is a common problem in environmental management worldwide. To restrict enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors, China has implemented a public supervision system based on environmental information publicity, which guides the public to participate in environmental governance and supervises enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors. This study exploits a quasi-natural experiment based on the disclosure policy of the Pollution Information Transparency Index in China from 2008 and the difference-in-differences method to evaluate the disclosure effect of public supervision on enterprises' environmental violations, and to examine its environmental benefits and their realization path. We find that the public supervision system is conducive to the disclosure of enterprises' environmental violations. At the same time, public supervision has achieved the expected environmental benefits, mainly realized by reducing enterprises' output to reduce polluting emissions, and this mechanism is more obvious for high-polluting enterprises.

This article provides causal evidence on a long-standing controversy in the finance and labour literature, namely, whether better health and safety in the working environment is in the best interests of firm owners. While, on the one hand, an influential strand of the literature argues that improvements in workers’ health and safety provision can increase costs and harm the market value of equity, another well-consolidated strand of the literature argues that such improvements can reduce costs and create shareholder value. It is empirically challenging to study the relation between the work environment and equity value due to their endogenous relation. To overcome this challenge, I utilize a historic natural experiment that uniquely isolates the effects of mandated investments in health and safety provision on firm market value: on 27 March 1974, the Swedish hung parliament drew a lottery ticket to decide on a legislative proposal that mandated companies to improve their employees’ work environment. The lottery resulted in the approval of the proposal. I find that this outcome led to an immediate and sizable decrease in the market value of Swedish companies that persisted for several days.

In this paper, we present a series of environmental policies that were implemented by the city-state of Athens during the Classical period (508–323 BCE) through a specific set of environmental institutions. They included: waste management, the implementation of a recycling process regarding animal manure as well as hygiene practices. Special administrative bodies were set up for this purpose with the power to impose heavy fines to offenders, and the actual job of environmental protection was contracted out to private operators. We argue that the success of the Athenian environmental institutions should primarily be attributed to the economic stimuli that the Athenian state provided to their staff so as to perform their duties efficiently, as well as to the imposition of fines and/or other penalties if they provided subpar services. We finally provide proposals as to how the Athenian environmental policies may be seen as an inspiration for our modern societies.

Many economic analyses, including those that address the COVID-19 pandemic, focus on the value of averting deaths and do not include the value of averting nonfatal illnesses. Yet, incorporating the value of averting nonfatal cases may change conclusions about the desirability of the policy. While per case values may be small, the number of nonfatal cases is often large, far outstripping the number of fatal cases. The value of averting nonfatal cases is also increasingly important in evaluating COVID-19 policy options as vaccine- and infection-related immunity and treatments reduce the case-fatality rate. Unfortunately, little valuation research is available that explicitly addresses COVID-19 morbidity. We describe and implement an approach for approximating the value of averting nonfatal illnesses or injuries and apply it to COVID-19 in the USA. We estimate gains from averting COVID-19 morbidity of about 0.01 quality-adjusted life year (QALY) per mild case averted, 0.02 QALY per severe case, and 3.15 QALYs per critical case. These gains translate into monetary values of about $5300 per mild case, $11,000 per severe case, and $1.8 million per critical case. While these estimates are imprecise, they suggest the magnitude of the effects.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s regulation of disposable lighters was targeted at preventing injuries due to use of lighters by children not over 4 years of age. Based on a difference-in-differences analysis of national data for 1990–2019, this article estimates that the regulation reduced all injuries to the target population by 71%, burn injuries by 74%, and injuries severe enough to warrant admission to the hospital by 85% overall and by 84% for burn injuries. Unlike the counterproductive performance of safety cap regulations, this safety device enhanced safety levels in the target population group. The safety improvements from lighter safety devices outweigh any lulling effect of viewing products as being “childproof.” The regulation had a broader safety impact beyond the target population group, as it also reduced all types of injuries by at least 50% for children in the 5–17 age groups. Total annual risk reduction benefits were $940–$1465 million. A benefit-cost analysis based on a retrospective assessment of the regulation finds a more favorable impact than was anticipated.

In this study we investigate the effectiveness of environmental regulation in a large developing country. We construct a panel of 3,436 major toxics polluters from 2004 to 2015 using detailed plant-specific data on toxics releases, inspections, and fines, across Mexico. Our results show that regulators target polluters who are significantly non-compliant and impose higher fines on them. This has implications for the cost efficiency of monitoring and regulatory enforcement. An additional priority violation increases current toxics inspections, fines, and amount of fines by 7, 5 and 18 per cent, respectively. An additional priority violation followed by fines imposed on the plant results in a reduction in annual toxics releases by more than 50 per cent. Higher fines imposed on other major facilities in the same municipality induce plants to reduce the annual release of toxic pollutants by 0.1 per cent. Finally, inspections and fines increase the likelihood of reporting toxics releases.

This is the second of two companion papers that discuss accidents caused by robots. In the first paper (Guerra et al., 2021), we presented the novel problems posed by robot accidents, and assessed the related legal approaches and institutional opportunities. In this paper, we build on the previous analysis to consider a novel liability regime, which we refer to as ‘manufacturer residual liability’ rule. This makes operators and victims liable for accidents due to their negligence – hence, incentivizing them to act diligently; and makes manufacturers residually liable for non-negligent accidents – hence, incentivizing them to make optimal investments in R&D for robots' safety. In turn, this rule will bring down the price of safer robots, driving unsafe technology out of the market. Thanks to the percolation effect of residual liability, operators will also be incentivized to adopt optimal activity levels in robots' usage.

Despite repeated calls for retrospective regulatory review by every President since the 1970s, progress on implementing such reviews has been slow. We argue that part of the explanation for the slow progress to date stems from misalignment between the goals of regulatory review and the institutional framework used for the review. We define three distinct goals of regulatory review – the rule relevance goal, the rule improvement goal, and the regulatory learning goal. We then examine the text of the Presidential Executive Orders and major Congressional legislation addressing retrospective review, and document which goals were targeted and which institutions were used to conduct the reviews. We find that the U.S. federal government has almost always sought review of one rule at a time, conducted by the agency that issued or promulgated the rule and that these reviews tend to focus on rule relevance and costs. This institutional framework for retrospective review – one rule, assessed by the promulgating agency, focused on relevance and cost – is only well-suited to a narrow interpretation of the rule improvement goal. We then review alternative institutional structures that could better meet the rule improvement goal and the broader regulatory learning goal across multiple rules and agencies, and we offer recommendations for developing new guidance and institutions to promote multiagency regulatory learning.

In robot torts, robots carry out activities that are partially controlled by a human operator. Several legal and economic scholars across the world have argued for the need to rethink legal remedies as we apply them to robot torts. Yet, to date, there exists no general formulation of liability in case of robot accidents, and the proposed solutions differ across jurisdictions. We proceed in our research with a set of two companion papers. In this paper, we present the novel problems posed by robot accidents, and assess the legal challenges and institutional prospects that policymakers face in the regulation of robot torts. In the companion paper, we build on the present analysis and use an economic model to propose a new liability regime which blends negligence-based rules and strict manufacturer liability rules to create optimal incentives for robot torts.

The outcome of environmental actions from participation in the export market are examined by unpacking some mechanisms that explain the estimated relationship. The empirical strategy utilizes the variation in the distance between the location of the sampled enterprises and the top 25 destinations of Vietnamese exports across sectors, and the weight of each sampled export to total exports in each period, to obtain exogenous variation in the enterprise's export market participation. The result shows a positive relationship between the enterprise's export participation and its overall engagement in environmental actions (such as the sum of its environmental actions, the sum of actions in the investments in equipment towards environmental issues, and total expenditure for the purchase of equipment for environmental actions). Possible mechanisms are international standardization, national certification, and strong enforcement of environmental regulations from export market engagement.

The European Union (EU) often conditions preferential access to its market on compliance with Non-Trade Policy Objectives (NTPOs), including human rights and labor and environmental standards. In this paper, we first systematically document the coverage of NTPOs across the main tools of EU trade policy: its (association and non-association) trade agreements and Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) programs. We then discuss the extent to which the EU can use these tools as a ‘carrot-and-stick’ mechanism to promote NTPOs in trading partners. We argue that, within trade agreements, the EU has limited scope to extend or restrict tariff preferences to ‘reward good behavior’ or ‘punish bad behavior’ on NTPOs, partly because multilateral rules require members to eliminate tariffs on substantially all trade. By contrast, GSP preferences are granted on a unilateral basis, and can thus more easily be extended or limited, depending on compliance with NTPOs. Our analysis also suggests that the commercial interests of the EU inhibit the full pursuit of NTPOs in its trade agreements and GSP programs.