Banks Increase Welfare

How Trade Unions Increase Welfare

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

Do Online Social Networks Increase Welfare?

We consider a strategic online social network that controls information flows between agents in a social learning setting. Agents on the network select among products of competing firms of unknown quality. The network sells advertising to firms. We consider display advertising, which is standard firm-to-consumer advertising, and social advertising, in which agents who purchased that firm’s prod...

When do fat taxes increase consumer welfare?

Previous analyses of fat taxes have generally worked within an empirical framework in which it is difficult to determine whether consumers benefit from the policy. This note outlines on simple means to determine whether consumers benefit from a fat tax by comparing the ratio of expenditures on the taxed good to the weight effect of the tax against the individual's willingness to pay for a one-p...

Do Energy Efficiency Standards Increase Social Welfare ?

Does generic entry always increase consumer welfare?

This article examines how the nature of competition between brands in a therapeutic category changes after generic entry and provide a framework for analyzing the effect of generic entry on consumer welfare that takes into account the generic free riding problem. It demonstrates that changes in competition along dimensions other than retail price--such as competition in research and development...