The New Challenge to Cost-Benefit Analysis

Last year, researchers Frank Ackerman of Tufts University, Lisa Heinzerling of Georgetown University, and Rachel Massey of the Environmental Research Foundation released a highly controversial study challenging the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as part of government policymaking. The three carried out their own original empirical study of several environmental decisions from the 1960s and 1970s. They conclude that CBA would have yielded results that history shows would have been undesirable. But are their analyses fair ones, and is it correct to assume that their undesirable results correctly characterize CBAs?