Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error-free or may incorrectly conjecture error...

Suppose that there are two treatments for a condition. One is the status quo, whose properties are known from experience and the other is an innovation, whose properties are not known initially. A new cohort of persons presents itself each period and a planner must choose how to treat this...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...