Incorporating equity and justice concerns in regulation

Abstract

US regulatory agencies have been encouraged to consider the equity and distributional impacts of regulations for decades. This paper examines the extent to which such analysis is done and provides recommendations for improving it. We analyze 189 regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) that monetize at least some benefits and costs prepared by a variety of agencies from October 2003 to January 2021. We find that only two RIAs calculated the net benefits of a policy for a specific demographic group. Furthermore, only 21% of RIAs calculate some benefits by group (typically for demographic groups) and only 20% calculate some costs by group (typically for industry groups such as small entities). Overall, the differences between presidential administrations are relatively small compared to the differences between agencies in their performance using our measures of distributional analysis. We then evaluate a sample of 23 analyses related to environmental justice (EJ) prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between January 2010 and January 2022. The EJ analyses frequently identify disproportionate exposures to pollutants for a variety of groups and discuss the effects of proposed regulations on these exposures, but they rarely consider the distribution of costs and less than half consider any alternatives. To date, virtually no agency prepares a distributional analysis that could help regulators evaluate whether a proposed regulation, on net, advantages or disadvantages a particular group and whether an alternative could generate a preferred distributional outcome.