The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of weaknesses are considered in this paper: social-welfare arrangements are often not financially robus...

Data suggest that macro asset pricing models attributing risk premia solely to covariance with aggregate consumption shocks generally perform poorly. Yet, there is no consensus over what alternative primitive pricing factors should accompany or take the place of aggregate consumption. We assume an economy where agents are like economists: they know that factors other than aggregate consumption ...

Analysis of the welfare effect of advertising depends critically upon the effect of advertising on market prices. In many circumstances, advertising that leads to higher (lower) market prices is overproduced (underproduced) from society s perspective. This paper demonstrates that these predictions may not hold when consumer search costs are important. A model is developed to show how advertisin...

this paper seeks to understand the role of the cost of pollution from vehicles fuel in feasibility of cng national plan. optimal control theory is used with two target functions, one with and another without the cost of pollution. model results indicate the high importance of pollution cost in the project feasibility, in such a way that without consideration of that the project will be infeasib...

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the upstream conditions mainly affect the distribution of profits. We compare the welfare effects of upstre...

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that re...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisons one defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a framework for one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distribution individual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of) choice(s). Satisfiable aspirations in the sense that there exists some choice guaranteeing them define a mu...

I study the effects of long-run inflation and income taxation in an economy where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. I construct a tractable competitive search framework that generates dispersion of prices, income and wealth. I analytically characterize the stationary equilibrium and the policy effects on individual choices. Quantitative analysis finds that monetary and fiscal pol...

We examine the response of Medicare Advantage contracts to published quality ratings. We identify the effect of star ratings on premiums using a regression discontinuity design that exploits plausibly random variation around rating thresholds. We find that 3, 3.5, and 4-star contracts in 2009 significantly increased their 2010 monthly premiums by $20 or more relative to contracts just below the...