The regulatory state faces a set of paradoxes, in the form of strategies that achieve an end precisely opposite to the one intended. These include: (2) overregulation can produce underregulation; (2) stringent regulation of new risks can increase aggregate risk levels; (3) requiring the best...

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions - possibilities that go well beyond, and that may supplement or complement, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose...

This paper offers a framework for regulating internalities. Using a simple economic model, we provide four principles for designing and evaluating behaviorally-motivated policy. We then outline rules for determining which contexts reliably reflect true preferences and discuss empirical...

What is the relationship among fear, danger, and the law? There are serious problems with the increasingly influential Precautionary Principle - the idea that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are uncertain and even if we do not know that...

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the...