"For government policymakers, the potential of markets to support decision making is 'humongous,' says Bob Hahn, director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Will cutting taxes raise the GDP? Congress can debate it. But if you establish a market for the question, the answer will likely be superior to whatever one Congress arrives at. You can bet on it."

"Cost-benefit analysis—which typically quantifies the attractions and drawbacks of a regulation, converts them into dollars or euros, then tots them up—sounds both dull and innocuous. But its findings can be revealing. For example, Robert Hahn, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, calculates that over 40% of American regulations impose costs that outweigh the benefits they confer. What might a similar review of the European Union's regulatory rule-book reveal? How many of the 90,000 pages of the acquis communautaire might be safely torn out, to the net benefit of the union?

The findings of Mr Hahn and other cost-benefit analysts in America have not passed unchallenged, however. A number of critics doubt the worth of the techniques and distrust the motives of the practitioners. They say that America's current administration is guilty of “regulatory underkill” and that cost-benefit analysis is its weapon of choice. 

...Discounting future lives is indeed awkward, and some economists have fretted about it for decades. But it is not necessarily anti-regulatory. If regulators discounted costs, but not lives saved, they would defer action indefinitely, Mr Hahn points out. The benefits would be the same if they waited a year (or a decade, for that matter) but the costs would always be less."

"Since it's the holiday season, the Regulators asked some of those who spend their days engrossed in the minutiae of the Federal Register to take a break and stuff some stockings with messages of goodwill for the new year. Their responses:

...Robert W. Hahn, executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Studies, wants 'three lumps of carbon-free coal for environmentalists; a 100-mile-per-gallon SUV; an optional carbon tax (for economists only);' and, for the Bush administration, 'news that global warming is just a bunch of hot air.'"

The Economist, November 18, 2004, "Guessing games"

Robert Hahn, director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Centre for Regulatory Studies, argues in a new paper that information markets could be of great help in forming policy, especially when combined with performance-related contracts. Suppose that a foundation is thinking of paying $5 for every child vaccinated against a certain disease. Information markets can be used to estimate the number of children who will suffer from the disease both with and without the bounty. That gives a market-based estimate of the benefit to be had from paying the bounty. The foundation might then auction the rights to the bounty to ensure that the vaccinations are performed at the lowest cost. That sounds far-fetched now, but such schemes may one day be common, given the ability of well-designed, liquid markets to reveal information.

Cindy Skrzycki , June 8, 2004, the Washington Post, "The Regulators" Column

Robert Hahn, executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Studies, said the Reagan executive order became the template for regulating in the United States and in other developed countries. Hahn said regulators now routinely take "a hard look" at how a rule will affect costs and benefits and try to quantify that effect -- a process that many consumer and liberal group oppose.

Cindy Skrzycki , April 20, 2004, the Washington Post, "The Regulators" Column

Document Database: The AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies has created an online database of regulatory impact statements dating to 1980 covering hundreds of rules. The center said that the statements are the "central building blocks of government regulation," which include important and hard-to-find documents such as cost-benefit analyses and other documents. In many cases, the documents were pre-Internet and had to be unearthed as originals from the 13 agencies that are in the database. "While the government has been talking about this, we have put it together in real-time," said Robert Hahn, executive director of the center.

The Economist, December 4, 2003, "Competition is all"

"Mr. Vickers also argues that broad-based deregulation should often be regarded as a primary tool of competition policy—not a view that the OFT or similar agencies have always eagerly espoused. Much of the public may be sceptical too, often regarding efforts to replace direct control with competition as a cause of subsequent grief. Excellent reading on this is a new paper by Alfred Kahn, doyen of America's regulation economists. In a study jointly published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, Mr. Kahn assaults the widely held view that America's deregulation of airlines and telecoms has been a terrible failure—and the main cause of the financial disasters lately visited upon those industries.

...Deregulation of the airline industry has been, he says, “a nearly unqualified success, despite the industry's unusual vulnerability to recessions, acts of terrorism and war.” The benefits to consumers have been estimated at in excess of $20 billion a year, mainly in the form of lower fares and huge increases in the availability of fast one-stop services between hundreds of cities. Consumers do complain that standards of service have fallen. So they have—because passengers are unwilling to pay for them. Through competition, the market has discovered that consumers prefer cheap tickets to frills. Such discoveries are the whole point."

While much of the New Deal heritage -- the safety net, progressive taxation, market regulation -- has been rolled back, Washington has more and more to say about health, safety and environmental issues. And the cost of that regulation, as my grandmother never said, isn't chopped liver. At the last reckoning by the Office of Management and Budget, private outlays to comply with social regulation topped $200 billion, and they are rising rapidly. This is not necessarily bad, as people who have breathed the air in Denver lately or taken a swim in Lake Erie can attest. But ask an economist who follows regulatory issues, and you will hear that federal regulation is a hodgepodge of the smart and the perverse, the elegantly precise and the miserably flat-footed, the extraordinarily cost-effective and the grotesquely wasteful. That's where the new Joint Center for Regulatory Studies fits in. The center, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, will act as a nonpartisan watchdog, assessing big-ticket initiatives and producing an annual report on the effect of regulation. "The real purpose is to keep the regulators -- and the legislators who regulate the regulators -- on their toes," said Robert Hahn, the center's director.

"The scientific research community supports the idea of intellectual honesty. Business has always wanted to see and double-check the science that underlies important federal rules. And some in Congress think everyone should have access to scientific data collected with taxpayer dollars. This sharing of information is known as "transparency," and it sounds as though it might be a hard thing to argue against. But as the Office of Management and Budget works on a rule that would allow anyone to take a peek at the scientific calculations that go into devising thousands of federal rules and policies, the scientific, university and medical communities are scrambling to limit broad access to this data. Critics argue that under Shelby's law, anyone wanting to peer into the work of researchers could have a field day, since 60 percent of the scientific research conducted at colleges and universities is funded by the federal government. Researchers have a long list of worries. They predict that confidentiality agreements with research subjects would be breached, companies' proprietary information could fall into the hands of competitors, and funding relationships between universities and private industry would be jeopardized. "FOIA is a tried and tested mechanism for making information available to the public," [Senator] Shelby said in a talk he gave Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. He said the new OMB rule would "empower the people to have access to the data." Others in the research and regulatory arenas are looking for a middle ground. Robert Hahn, director of the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and Linda Cohen, an economics professor at the University of California at Irvine, suggest tailoring access to the documents. They believe there should be access to the information that results in regulations that have significant economic impact -- such as the EPA's 1997 ozone and particulate matter standard, which would make current air-pollution rules more stringent -- and an independent agency should be created to replicate the results of research before any standard becomes final."