Economic Analysis of Regulation
Government regulations affect every industry and product market as well as the labor market. They affect the markets for commodities and services, and for real and financial products. They promote important social objectives, such as safe products and workplaces, a clean environment, and responsible development. They also impose costs on firms and individuals, as well as raise the risk of regulatory capture. The design of optimal regulations involves measuring and balancing costs and benefits, and considering both direct and indirect effects. This can be complex when multiple agencies have jurisdiction to oversee different aspects of a single product, as happens in financial services when the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as various state financial regulators, may have a role.
To promote research on the costs and benefits of economic regulation, the NBER, with support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, will convene a research conference in Cambridge, MA on Friday, May 7, 2027. The conference will be organized by NBER Research Associates Amit Seru (Stanford University), Steve Cicala (Tufts University and University of Zurich) and Craig Garthwaite (Northwestern University). The conference will bring together researchers from a variety of subfields within economics, including financial economics, and from related fields such as law and political science, to showcase different perspectives on regulatory policy.
The organizers invite submissions of research papers on any issue pertaining to economic regulation. They plan to devote part of the conference to financial regulation. Topics of interest include:
- Measuring the benefits and/or costs of economic regulation in specific sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, real estate, energy, health care, and financial services, and the treatment of time, risk, and distributional considerations in regulatory analysis.
- The regulation of product attributes as non-tariff barriers to trade.
- Strategies for assessing how regulatory policy, in one or multiple sectors, affects the aggregate level of economic activity.
- Insights from cross-country differences in regulatory policy that inform the effects of regulation on firms and households.
- Comparisons of ex ante projections of the cost of regulatory compliance with ex post estimates of these costs.
- Analyses of deregulatory initiatives in specific industries or across industries, and their effects on industry participants or economic growth.
- Comparisons of alternative regulatory structures and approaches.
- Assessments of how regulatory policy affects innovation.
The organizers welcome submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, and of papers by scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates. To be considered for inclusion on the program, papers must be uploaded by midnight (ET) on Tuesday, February 9, 2027, via the following link:
Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and that will be published by May 2027. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in early March 2027.
Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.