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8 Wake Forest J. L. & Pol'y 29 (2018)
Numbers Matter: Estimating the Cost of State Funeral Regulations

handle is hein.journals/wfjlapo8 and id is 33 raw text is: NUMBERS MATTER: ESTIMATING THE COST OF STATE FUNERAL REGULATIONS DAVID E. HARRINGTONt &JARET TREBERtt I. INTRODUCTION S tate funeral regulations have been challenged in a series of court cases for unjustifiably increasing the cost of funerals to consumers.' The plaintiffs' arguments rest on two types of evidence: simple logic using economic reasoning, and statistical evidence directly tying the regulations to the cost of funerals.2 The first type, arguments based on logic, typically documents the extra costs that a particular regulation imposes on firms and then argues that these costs must be passed onto consumers via higher prices.3 The second type, statistical evidence, typically compares funeral prices or expenditures across states with different regulations while controlling for other factors affecting costs.4 In this essay, we use new data on the price of funerals across metropolitan areas of state capitals to explain how economists estimate the cost of state funeral regulations. We chose state capitals to highlight the cost that state legislators and governors are imposing on their own neighbors by failing to reform state funeral regulations, almost all of which were enacted when funeral markets were far different than they are today.5 For t. Himmelright Professor of Economics, Kenyon College. #. Associate Professor of Economics, Kenyon College. 1. SLJoseph Abbey v. Castille, 712 F.3d 215 (5th Cir. 2013); Brown v. Hovatter, 516 F.3d 357 (4th Cir. 2009); Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark v. Christie, No. 15-5647, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 57443 (D.N.J. Apr. 29, 2016); Heffner v. Murphy, 866 F. Supp.2d 358 (M.D. Penn. 2012); Porter v. State, No. 2016AP1 599, 2017 Wisc. App. LEXIS 635 (Wis. Ct. App. Aug. 29, 2017); Stoll v. Minn. Dep't of Health, No. 62-CV-12-443, 2013 WL 7204912 (Minn. Dist. Oct. 9, 2013). 2. Jerry Ellig, State Funeral Regulations: Inside the Black Box, 48 J. REGUL. ECON. 97, 98-99 (2015). 3. Id. 4. Id. at 98. 5. David Foos, State Ready-to-Embalm Laws and the Modern Funeral Market: The Need for Change and Suggested Alternatives, 2012 MICH. ST. L. Rv. 1375, 1376 (2012).

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