The Empty Call for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Financial Regulation
本文指出金融监管中的成本收益分析误解了其起源和效用，因为金融系统的成本和收益由监管本身构建，无法像环境监管那样稳定计算，监管应基于规范性价值权衡而非量化分析。
The call for benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in financial regulation misunderstands the origins and utility of BCA as a guide to administrative rule making. Benefit-cost analysis imagines an omniscient social planner who can calculate costs and benefits from a natural system that generates prices (costs and benefits) that do not change (or change much) no matter what the central planner does. For example, the toxicity of chemicals, the health hazards of emissions, the statistical value of life—these do not change in response to health-and-safety regulation. For the financial sector, however, the system that generates costs and benefits is constructed by financial regulation itself and the subsequent processes of adaptation and regulatory arbitrage. An important new rule will change the system beyond our calculative powers. Instead of weighing costs and benefits, financial regulation necessarily is based on a series of trade-offs of normatively derived values, which may entail principles of pragmatic design.