Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News

Americans are failing to save for retirement, investing their money foolishly, and choosing health insurance plans that poorly meet their needs. Why do so many of us make bad choices on such important issues? Recent scientific research shows that people are susceptible to cognitive biases. Because we are human, we are fallible, and because we are fallible, we can use some help. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein examine these issues in their new book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). They argue that nudges can be deployed easily and inexpensively in many contexts, producing concrete benefits for real people.

AGENDA

Friday, April 18th, 2008, 11:45 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI; 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
11:45 A.M. Registration and Lunch
12:15 P.M. Welcome, ROBERT HAHN, Reg-Markets Center
12:30 Presenters: Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler both of the University of Chicago
Discussant: Jeffrey R. Kling, Brookings Institution
2:00 Adjournment

Videos of AEI events are often available as webcasts at www.reg-markets.org and on CSPAN at www.CSPAN.org or www.BookTV.or

Biographies:

Robert Hahn is a senior fellow at AEI and founder and executive director of AEI’s Reg-Markets Center, which continues the AEI-Brookings Joint Center’s mission of examining cutting-edge issues in law, economics, regulation, and antitrust. Previously, he worked for the Council of Economic Advisers and served on the faculties of Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University. He frequently contributes to leading scholarly journals and general-interest periodicals, including the American Economic Review, the Yale Law Journal, Science, and the New York Times. Mr. Hahn is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI Press, 2000) and several other books. In addition, Mr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School, an inner-city middle school in Providence, R.I., that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

Jeffrey R. Kling is the deputy director and a senior fellow in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Kling is director of the Policy Evaluation Project, which coordinates the selection, design, implementation, and analysis of randomized experiments conducted in partnership with private firms and government agencies that test policy innovations. He has previously served as assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, special assistant to the secretary at the Department of Labor, and assistant to the chief economist at the World Bank. He was awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation and a Scholar Award from the W. T. Grant Foundation for his work integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods in identifying the causal effects of public policies. The results of this research have been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and have been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and the department of political science. Mr. Sunstein is a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall and was the attorney-advisor in the Department of Justice. He is the author of many books, including After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (Harvard University Press, 1990), Free Markets and Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 1997), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007). His edited books include Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy, with Stephen Breyer, Richard Stewart, and Matthew Spitzer (Aspen Publishers, 1998). He has testified before congressional committees on many topics in regulation and administrative law and has participated in constitution-making and law-reform activities in many nations, including Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Poland, and China.

Richard H. Thaler is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics and director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. Previously, he worked as a research economist for the Center of Naval Analyses and as a professor at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Thaler, with coauthor Shlomo Benartzi of the University of California, Los Angeles, won the 2005 Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writing on lifelong financial security for “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings,” which was published in the Journal of Political Economy. He has published a number of articles in prominent journals such as the American Economics Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy. He is the author of Quasi Rational Economics (Russell Sage Foundation, 1994) and The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (Princeton University Press, 1994), and he edited Advances in Behavioral Finance (Russell Sage Foundation, 1993).

http://www.reg-markets.org/events/page.php?id=169
AEI Center for Regulatory and Market Studies www.reg-markets.org
The AEI Center for Regulatory and Market Studies was founded by Bob Hahn in 2008 as the successor to the AEI-Brookings Joint Center. A primary aim of the Reg-Markets Center is to gain a deeper understanding of how markets, laws and regulation contribute to economic well-being. The Center will be an independent voice in policy debates.