The full text of this book is available on the AEI-Brookings Joint Center website.

This monograph assesses how the adverse health implications associated with regulatory costs can affect mortality risk by considering a broad group of federal regulations. A minimal test of the desirability of regulations is that they further their primary objectives. In some cases, regulations designed to reduce health, safety, and environmental risks can actually increase risk, especially when such regulations lead to significant reductions in private expenditures on life-saving investments.

The authors find that an unintended increase in risk is likely to result from the majority of the twenty-four regulations they examine. A more positive result is that aggregate mortality risk falls for the entire set of regulations, primarily because a few regulations yield large reductions in risk.

This analysis helps to highlight the potential problems with inefficient regulation and can serve as a useful complement to other forms of analysis, such as benefit-cost analysis. The authors conclude that regulations whose primary purpose is to save lives may have the unintended consequence of actually increasing mortality. Congress and the regulatory agencies should seriously consider alternatives that would yield higher levels of economic welfare and save more lives.

Robert W. Hahn is a resident scholar at AEI and director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Randall W. Lutter is a fellow at the AEI-Brookings Joint CEnter for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at AEI. W. Kip Viscusi is the John F. Cogan Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and director of the Program on Empirical Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.