Regulatory policy: what role for retrospective analysis and review?

Given that President Obama’s Executive Orders on regulation have emphasized the importance of retrospective analysis and review of existing federal rules, I survey the state of retrospective analysis and review of federal regulations. I first ask how much is known about the economic merit of past federal regulatory decisions, based on retrospective economic analyses of their effects. I review reports of the Office of Management and Budget and related literature, but unlike those reports I find only five rules, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), for which retrospective analyses provide estimates of both costs and reasonably good proxies for benefits (e.g., adverse health effects avoided). Other retrospective studies of federal rules estimate are incomplete, estimating only the compliance costs, or only the benefits, or only costs and measures of effectiveness, like emissions reductions, which do not closely relate to people’s welfare.