Article history: Received 15 October 2009 Received in revised form 22 April 2010 Accepted 5 May 2010 Available online 12 May 2010

A major trend in foster care in developed countries over the past quarter century has been a shift toward placing children with "kin" rather than with unrelated foster parents. This change in practice is widely backed by legislation and is routinely justified as being in the best interests of the child. It is tempting to interpret this change as indicating that the child welfare profession has ...

Article history: The child welfare system s Received 2 August 2008 Received in revised form 1 October 2008 Accepted 6 October 2008 Available online 22 October 2008

After the collapse of communism, Eastern and Southeastern European counties have experienced significant changes, especially in terms of transition to market economy was achieved through efforts of liberalization and elimination of all forms of national control. As a consequence, some of the social welfare states in the region, still anchored to the old forms of organization, faced serious diff...

Innovation by users is now understood to be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this paper we explore the implications of adding innovation by users to existing models of social welfare that currently assume innovation by manufacturers only. We find this addition removes several inefficiencies, and that social welfare is likely to be increased by the presence of user inn...

Science-based policy making and assessments are individualistic insofar as they are sensitive to interindividual differences, intraindividual connectivity, or both. Several scientists and policymakers have argued that nonhuman animal welfare should relate to individual animals, but there are reasons for both individualistic and nonindividualistic approaches. Opportunities to develop more indivi...

We present a formal logic of social welfare functions. The logical language is syntactically simple, but expressive enough to express interesting and complicated properties of social welfare functions involving, e.g., quantification over both preference relations and over individual alternatives, such as Arrow’s thorem.

Placement stability as an outcome goal in child welfare performance measurement is grounded in the importance of providing stability for children as they are developing attachments and relationships to caregivers. Research shows that many children are vulnerable to placement instability, especially those who have been in long term foster care. This literature review provides an overview of the ...

“Nudge”-style interventions are typically evaluated on the basis of their effects on behavior, not social welfare. We use a field experiment to measure the welfare effects of one especially policy-relevant intervention, home energy conservation reports. We measure consumer welfare by sending introductory reports and using an incentive-compatible multiple price list to determine willingness-to-p...