Enhancing benefit-cost analysis to provide more information on how policies affect the advantaged and disadvantaged was a major theme of the 2024 Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA) annual conference. CHDS’ Lisa Robinson led three related panels. In “Recent Developments in U.S. Regulations: Benefits, Costs, and Other Implications,” scholars and government officials discussed trends in regulatory activities and new requirements for supporting analyses. In “Distributional Analysis in Action,” panelists considered how to improve distributional analysis of major Federal regulations under the revised Circular A-4, Regulatory Analysis guidance. In “The Missing Piece: How Are Regulatory Costs Distributed?,” a panel of experts discussed the challenges of estimating who bears regulatory costs that are initially imposed on industry.
Robinson also chaired a session on “Beyond BCA: Innovations and Ethical Considerations.” Some papers presented in that session will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis on “Ethics and Benefit-Cost Analysis” that she is editing. In addition, CHDS faculty Ankur Pandya presented “Efficient Frontiers, Threshold Parameters, and Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.” He discussed the challenges of estimating the degree of inequality aversion, which is generally unknown. He proposed to instead use an efficient frontier method, demonstrating its application to a gene therapy cure for sickle cell disease.
Learn more: Read the publication, Attention to Distribution in U.S. Regulatory Analysis
Learn more: Read the publication, Distributional Cost-Effectiveness of Equity-Enhancing Gene Therapy in Sickle Cell Disease in the United States
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