A process perspective on regulation: Who bears the dispersed costs of regulation?

Abstract

Scholars in both Austrian Economics and the Public Choice tradition intuitively understand that intervention often creates redistribution from lower income households to the middle class, but there has been little systematic inquiry into the distributional consequences of interventionism. This paper systematically applies Austrian insights to the dispersed costs side of the analysis of intervention to offer a better sense of how large those costs may be and who tends to bear them. An emergent literature on the regressive effects of regulation highlights those distributional consequences both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective.