The minimum wage, unlike most government transfer programs, lowered welfare in the 1980s and 1990s as measured by all commonly used welfare or inequality measures, including various Atkinson indexes, the Gini index, standard deviation of logarithms, and others. The effects of most government programs, macroeconomic variables, and aggregate demographic characteristics were qualitatively the same...

The paper synthesizes and develops the welfare analysis of regulating relative prices, for example price differences, of which banning price discrimination is a special case. Welfare results are derived directly by convexity arguments using functions of welfare levels. The method is also used to obtain results about effects on consumer surplus.

We present a monetary endogenous growth model and analyze the effects of fiscal and monetary policy with real money as an argument in the utility function. We show that a balanced government budget gives a higher balanced growth rate and lower inflation than a situation with permanent public deficits. It also leads to higher welfare compared to a situation with permanent deficits where the gove...

When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one’s thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one’s “incidental” feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one’s personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carr...

Food products account for a significant amount of the Iranian imports. Despite the rising prices of food products over the last two decades, their imports have been increasing too. In this study import demand of the main imported food products is empirically analyzed using Quadratic AIDS. Welfare impacts are measured using compensated variation. The results indicate that all products, except te...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the macroeconomic effects of parametric reforms. An adjusted Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is used to study the effects of decreasing replacement and contribution rates of the pension system. The first part concentrates on the macroeconomic effect of reforms. Our results indicate that reducing the replacement and contribution rates increase the capital stock and d...

Within a two-sector-two-country model of trade with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, a move to a more generous welfare state in one country increases welfare in that country and can have positive spill-over effects on the other. Furthermore, synchronised expansions of social security are more welfare enhancing than unilateral ones. Our results counter the fears that a race to the bot...

China enacted a rural tax reform known as the “Tax-for-Fee Reform” (TFR) in the late 1990s, in large part driven by an attempt to address farmers’ complaints about their perception of a heavy tax burden. A crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform actually improved farmers’ welfare. This paper applies several estimation methods, including both cross-sectional propensity score match...