In the News

Update: A staffer at NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity passed along this critique of the CPR report cited above, from Michael Livermore, the institute’s executive director, and Richard Revesz, the dean of NYU’s law school. From the critique…

“I am not sure the business community sees any particular benefit to playing nice on these issues,” notes Michael A. Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “Clearly, they don’t see it in their interest to give the administration a lot of credit for what they have done so far.”

Jason Schwartz, legal director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, praised the agency’s draft recommendations but warned that an overreaction to last-minute rule making can create problems of its own.

He said the legislation being considered in Congress, for example, goes too far because it prevents federal agencies from not only proposing regulations during the midnight period but also approving regulations that were proposed before the midnight period.

“If a rule was proposed a long time ago, and has gone through all the required analysis and public scrutiny and internal vetting, then finalizing it in the midnight period doesn’t raise concerns for us,” he said.

He added that he believes the Administrative Conference’s proposal will do a better job than the legislation at addressing the real problem of midnight rule making, which is that administrations eager to get their regulations in place truncate the amount of time allotted for analysis and public comment.

Last week, the Western Energy Alliance released a report (PDF) claiming 120,905 jobs could be created if the U.S. government would just make it easier to drill for gas on public lands. There is no shortage of papers like this one, but there is a serious shortage of scrutiny of their results.

In this case, as with many others, the suggestion seems to be that a certain number of jobs could be gained by a policy change—that the nation’s economy will be 120,905 jobs richer and that 120,905 people who currently do not have a job will now be employed.

If only it were that easy. But it’s not, and it is misleading to suggest that it is.

Jason Schwartz is legal director at NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Jason Schwartz: Unfortunately, the trend across the country is toward adding more levels of regulatory review that aren’t particularly helpful.

Especially when, according to Schwartz, states regulate almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy.

This blog integrates material from recent analyses by the Institute for Policy Integrity and Economic Policy Institute (click here, here, and here) showing why “job-killing regulation” claims are bad economics and factually incorrect (click here for a broader discussion of the role of regulation in a well functioning economy).

No surprise that many people recently scratched their heads when the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity argued that two new EPA rules for curbing power plant emissions would trigger 1.4 million job losses, and the Political Economy Research Institute countered that the rules actually would generate 1.4 million jobs. Which calculation is right? The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law cited the colliding evaluations in its recent report, “The Regulatory Red Herring.” Thankfully, it also brought needed perspective to the discussion.

Today’s lapse drew some criticism. Instead of proposing a rule, EPA “moved the goal post for a fourth time since September,” Edna Ishayik, communications director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, wrote in an email.

The institute sent a letter to EPA today outlining several recommendations on how the rule should be shaped.

Between 2007 and 2011, use of the phrase “job-killing regulations” in U.S. newspapers increased by 17,550%. Recently, committees of the 112th U.S. House of Representatives convened twenty hearings in its first twenty days that explored the link between regulations and the country’s job numbers. Protections for our public health and environment in particular have been on the receiving end of this barrage.

Claims that regulations have a significant impact on American employment call for careful scrutiny. Because they are repeated so often, the idea that regulations “kill jobs” can start to sound true, or at least “truthy.” But when you scratch the surface of these claims, too often they are based more on ideology than sound methodology.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law attempts to bring some economic rationality to the regulatory discourse — however quixotic that might be in the current political environment, not to mention in a presidential election year.

The report is titled “The Regulatory Red Herring: The Role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates.” Yet somewhat surprisingly, Michael Livermore, the institute’s executive director, does not oppose factoring job impact into the cost-benefit analysis. Rather, he argues for adopting a more sophisticated approach than the prevalent knuckleheaded assumption — my words, not his — that increased regulation inevitably results in fewer jobs.