“Benefit Cost Analysis in Regulatory Impact Analysis, the Economic Principles Underlying Benefit Cost Analysis, and Case Studies in the Application of Benefit Cost Analyses”W. Kip Viscusi

While preparing the fifth edition of Economics of Regulation and Antitrust (MIT Press, 2018), I was struck by how many articles in the JBCA address core issues relating to benefit-cost analysis generally as well as its application to policy issues. My selected group of 16 articles is not an exhaustive list of excellent JBCA articles, but it does provide a valuable set of articles that cover a broad range of topics relating to the theory and practice of BCA.

To facilitate choosing which articles readers might find of interest, I have divided the articles into three groups. The first set considers the role of BCA in the context of regulatory impact analyses. Although the first major governmental applications of BCA were with respect to the evaluation of water-resource projects, BCA currently has the greatest policy prominence in the evaluation of government regulations. Several articles address the BCA principles that should be applied in regulatory impact analyses. The BCA guidelines are usually valuable more generally, not just for regulatory policy assessments. The second set of articles deals with economic principles for BCA. The topics span both fundamental theoretical concerns as well as empirical guidelines. The focus of the second set of contributions is primarily on benefit assessment issues. The third set of articles consists of case studies in the application of BCA. The articles are of interest not only because of the context-specific results but also because they often illustrate inventive applications of BCA to topics of major policy importance.