Richard Revesz Gives Remarks on the Book “Does Regulation Kill Jobs?”
Richard Revesz, director of Policy Integrity,spoke at the Penn Program on Regulation on the new book “Does Regulation Kill Jobs?””:http://https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/regulation/doesregulationkilljobs/index.html published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and edited by Penn Law faculty members Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, and Christopher Carrigan.
In a series of essays, the book answers the question posed by its title in a careful and highly nuanced manner, Revesz said, adding that “regulations do not ‘kill’ jobs in the cataclysmic ways sometimes implied in today’s shrill political debate, but they do at times have impacts on employment that can affect workers’ well-being and should be taken into account in order to make better regulatory decisions.”
The contributors—legal scholars, economists, political scientists, and policy analysts—explore regulation’s effects on employment and find that individual regulations can at times trigger employment shifts across firms, sectors, and regions. However, regulation overall is neither a prime job killer nor a key job creator.
The challenge for policymakers, the new book suggests, is to examine individual regulatory proposals to discern any job shifting they may cause and then to make regulatory decisions sensitive to anticipated employment effects. The contributors recommend methods for getting better estimates of job impacts when evaluating regulatory costs and benefits.