2020 Economists’ Comparisons of Welfare Policies: A few economists (Hendren, Sprung-Keyser) aggregated the results of studies that calculate the impact and costs of various welfare policies (US only). They develop a method to compare the impact of these policies. This paper has a lengthy description of this approach and contains the comparisons themselves (reference Table II. in the appendix for the full list and know that “MVPF” is the primary comparison metric). Hendren and, another economist, Finkelstein provide a less lengthy description here. There’s also a great 7-minute explainer video by econimate here (I’d start with this!).
Federal Government CBAs: Additionally, as @evelynciara mentioned earlier, the federal government uses cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) to evaluate regulations. Agencies (e.g. the Department of Energy) conduct these CBAs, which are then reviewed by OIRA (a group housed within OMB). You can find spreadsheets with aggregated results for different regulations here and can explore regulations.gov for specific CBAs.
Other: State and local governments will publish CBAs too (and economists frequently perform CBAs on state/local programs obviously), but I’m not aware of any aggregation of these studies beyond the work by Hendren, Sprung-Keyser, Finkelstein, et al.
|||||
MVPFs and CBAs calculate the ratio of benefits-to-costs (or costs-to-benefits). On the other hand, GiveWell generally calculates “$/life saved” and/or “cost-effectiveness in multiples of cash transfers” for each program they analyze. At first glance, the”cost-effectiveness in multiples of cash transfers” metric appears to approximate a ratio of benefits-to-costs. However, this ratio should not be compared to MVPF calculations by Hendren, nor the US CBAs for multiple reasons. One primary reason they shouldn’t be compared is that there are issues comparing cost-benefit ratios of programs that affect different income groups (a friend and I made a post about that issue here).
Happy to provide more info if you’re interested (for example, I think there are some limitations to the approach used by Hendren/Sprung-Keyser, but overall I think it’s awesome).
Yes, you’re correct that each department produces its own CBAs. However, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does help standardize these CBAs to some extent. For example, the federal government sets up “interagency working groups” to standardize specific inputs (e.g. the social cost of carbon) across departments (more info on social cost of carbon standardization). And, when OIRA reviews CBAs, they make sure departments are following some general standard processes too.