Does regulation kill jobs? The limits of quantification

This essay reviews a new edited volume entitled Does Regulation Kill Jobs? It concludes that this book brings much needed data and realism to the debate about jobs and the environment, showing that government regulation generally has minor impacts on employment. This essay focuses much of its attention on the suggestion, discussed by several of the contributors to this book, that cost-benefit analysis should include a dollar value representing an estimate of the value of employment changes a proposed regulation might cause. It discusses concerns about double counting, ex ante estimates of employment impacts, monetization of the value of employment impacts, and potentially misleading asymmetric analysis.