This Essay is a brief response to the stimulating essays on cost-benefit analysis of financial regulation by Professors Coates and Cox in this volume. Both Coates and Cox largely agree that we want policy decisions about financial regulation to be made using what Coates refers to as...

The myriad problems with the Dodd-Frank Act's ban on proprietary trading by banks have led to a rare bipartisan consensus: the Volcker Rule must be pared back or even repealed. At the root of the Rule's problems is the fundamental definitional challenge posed by the current approach. The...

Regulation is very persistent, even when inefficient. We propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog, the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information regarding the value of counterfactual policies. We construct a dynamic model of regulation in which the...

In the behavioral industrial organization literature, market forces may not eliminate inefficiencies associated with biased consumers. Regulations usually exist that could, but we show that self-governing citizen-consumers will not always enact these welfare-improving policies. In a market for...

Compared with other types of policy, regulation is very persistent, even when inefficient. We propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog, the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information about the effects of deregulation. We construct a dynamic model of...