Dr. John Morrall was a pioneer in the development of league tables that rank the cost-effectiveness of lifesaving federal regulations. Using Dr. Morrall’s methods, we developed a lifesaving league table for 2009–2024 and compared it to Dr. Morrall’s largest league table, which covered 1967–2001. Although the sample sizes in the two periods are relatively small and, therefore, limit statistically robust comparisons, we report suggestive evidence that the cost-effectiveness of federal lifesaving regulations has improved. The recent data reinforce Morrall’s observation that safety regulations tend to be more cost-effective than health regulations. We also verify a concern of some early critics of lifesaving league tables: as more of the non-lifesaving benefits of federal regulations are included in the ratios, the estimated cost-effectiveness improves. Finally, we describe some practical limitations of using benefit–cost analysis to achieve greater public protections at less cost and recommend that selection of regulatory alternatives be given more emphasis in the conduct of regulatory impact analysis.

Declining costs of photovoltaic (PV) technology and rising market and policy incentives are leading to the growing deployment of PV on cropland in the US Midwest, leading to concerns about the displacement of food and feed crop production. Agrivoltaic (AV) technology enables the dual use of land by co-locating PV energy and crop production, potentially reducing land-use competition with crop production. We develop a benefit-cost analysis framework to compare the net economic returns from AV to those with stand-alone PV and crop production on a representative field and show conditions under which AV can be more profitable for both a solar developer and a farmer. We integrate it with a crop and solar energy model to simulate the performance of various field designs and space and height configurations in AV systems to accommodate soybean production with conventional farm equipment under representative conditions in the US Midwest. We find that an AV system with soybean production is less profitable than PV alone for a solar developer due to the high capital costs of raising panel height, and less profitable for a farmer than leasing land for PV due to its adverse effects of shading on crop yield. We discuss the changes in technology and market prices of solar energy and soybeans that are necessary to make the AV system profitable for solar developers and farmers. We show that AV can worsen rather than mitigate the conflict between food crops and solar energy production in the Midwest.

This article quantifies the economic benefits of an influential early childhood program in a developing country, tracking participants with outcomes measured through age 31 years. Drawing on published experimental data encompassing life-cycle benefits – that rely primarily on available labor-market outcomes – alongside a rigorous cost analysis, we estimate an internal rate of return (IRR) of 10.4–10.7% and benefit–cost ratio of ~8. Even though estimates are not that precise, a variety of sensitivity analyses confirm the robustness of these findings. Notably, we find meaningful gender heterogeneity in returns: females exhibit a higher IRR of 11.5%, compared to their male counterparts (9.6%), suggesting that – in developing countries – early childhood programs may generate disproportionately larger economic gains for women.

Environmental pollution often affects the most disadvantaged people the most. In this paper, we argue that benefit–cost analyses of policies and programs designed to alleviate such inequalities should incorporate distributional considerations while respecting individual preferences. The concept of equivalent income offers a theoretically sound approach for defining distributional weights that does not rely on the comparison of well-being measures such as subjective utility, happiness or life satisfaction. We demonstrate how this concept can be used to analyze the implications of exposure to neurotoxic substances, which requires us to explicitly consider the endogenous relationship between neurodevelopment and income in the derivation of welfare weights. Through a simulation exercise, we show the difference between standard and inequity-aware welfare analysis and highlight the profound effect on program choice that accounting for unequal exposure to pollution has. Based on our results, we discuss why policymakers concerned with environmental health and safety should seek to factor fairness considerations into their decision-making processes.

Malaria imposes societal costs beyond health, including substantial effects on education, yet economic evaluations often overlook these broader impacts. We conducted a cross-sectoral benefit–cost analysis (BCA) of malaria chemoprevention in school-aged children (SAC) across ten high-burden sub-Saharan African countries. Using recent trial data, we estimated impacts on malaria morbidity, mortality, school absenteeism and literacy. The intervention was projected to cost $422 million and generate $5.7 billion in societal net benefits, yielding a benefit–cost ratio (BCR) of 14.3. Country-level BCRs ranged from 3.71 to 39.5, with the highest returns in Nigeria. Results were sensitive to drug choice, discount rate and valuation of education benefits. When using school quality metrics (estimated via learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS)), BCRs increased up to 100-fold compared to estimates based on school quantity alone. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis yielded a mean simulated BCR of 11.00 (95 per cent confidence interval (95% CI): 10.89–11.11), with a >95% probability of being cost-beneficial at a BCR threshold of 3. This study advances the evidence base for malaria chemoprevention in SAC, highlighting its dual health and educational benefits. These findings offer policymakers and funders strong evidence to prioritize malaria chemoprevention in SAC as a high-value investment in both health and human capital in malaria-endemic regions.

This paper lays out 10 important principles of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and also five barriers to its wider use, particularly ones related to potential adjustments to individuals’ valuations of impacts, recognizing that CBA is an aid, not necessarily an input, to public policy decision making. The principles are: (i) CBA assesses allocative efficiency, not social welfare. (ii) CBA is based on methodological individualism. (iii) Individuals act approximately rationally in a neoclassical sense, with some important exceptions. (iv) Property right allocations are normally exogenous to CBA. (v) All individuals are equal, based on positive or negative impacts of policy. (vi) Aggregate willingness-to-pay (WTP) or willingness-to-accept (WTA) primarily determines social surplus. (vii) Individuals value present consumption more than the same unit of future consumption. (viii) CBA follows a “no-envy” rule in estimating surplus. (ix) The nation is the default boundary for spatial standing but subnational jurisdictions with constitutional authority may also have legitimacy. (x) A constitutional-contractarianist principle can also justify expansion of spatial scope to supranational contexts. This paper addresses five barriers to wider use of CBA as a policy decision-making aid. There are three measurement problems that justify adjustments: lack of plausible monetary estimates, the legitimacy or not of aggregating heterogeneous preferences and discrepancies between WTP and WTA valuations for the same good. There are two more serious problems: discordance between the neoclassical and behavioral economics view of the overall efficacy of individual choice in some circumstances and the presence of physiological addiction.

Although wage rates are lower when employers have monopsony power, we find that the value of a statistical life (VSL) is not reduced when labor markets are more concentrated. Because the estimated VSL is the product of the wage and the wage-risk tradeoff rate, a greater tradeoff rate in highly concentrated U.S. labor markets produces a larger VSL. The general relationship we find is robust with respect to different labor market data. Our results provide the first evidence contradicting policy-related concerns that the VSL is lower in monopsonistic labor markets. The average VSL is often about $13 million (USD 2022) both for the full sample and at the median market concentration level, and it does not decline at higher levels of HHI.

A longstanding puzzle for regulatory theory and practice has been the valuation of children’s lives, or more precisely, the valuation of mortality risks faced by children. There are data about parents’ willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce such risks, and that data might be used to estimate the value per statistical life (VSL) for children. The problem is that any such VSL comes from the parents’ valuations; it might not adequately capture the welfare effects of risk reduction for children themselves. It can be shown, however, that use of parental WTP, and the resulting VSL, is justified on four assumptions: (1) parents have adequate information, (2) parents do not suffer from a relevant behavioral bias, (3) parents have a limited budget for expenditures on their children, and regulation would amount to a forced exchange, producing a dollar-for-dollar reduction from that budget, and (4) parents are sufficiently motivated to care about their children’s welfare, so that parental judgments about how to allocate limited resources for their children promote their children’s welfare. If we relax one or more of these assumptions, the appropriate VSL for children might be different from, and potentially higher than, the VSL that emerges from use of parental WTP. Implementing the proposed framework presents serious but tractable empirical challenges.