Treaties, Custom, Iteration, and Public Choice

Information and Public Choice

Happiness and Public Choice

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize tha...

Paternalism and public choice

There is an apparent contradiction in the economic approach to government policy. On one hand, neoclassical economists are champions of ‘consumer sovereignty’. This is the idea that individuals are the best judges of what is in their interests and should be able to make their own decisions. For example, economists would tend to oppose a regulation that required airbags to be installed in new ca...

Choice, Charters, and Public SchoolCompetition

ISSN 0428-1276 In the last century, public schools changed in ways that dramatically reduced the control that parents have over their local schools. Regaining that control is one key to improving the quality of our schools, and giving students a choice of schools is one way of increasing the influence that parents have over the way schools are run. Several types of school choice have arisen in ...

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emis...