This paper develops a revealed-preference approach that uses budget constrain discontinuities to price workplace safety. We track hourly workers who face the decision of how many hours to work at varying levels of Covid-19 risk and leverage state-specific discontinuities in unemployment...

A dynamic multi-stage decision-theoretic approach is introduced to establish the optimal offset and its incidence, the contract price arising from bargaining, and the scale of the acquisition. A new rationale is suggested for offsets in terms of their role as an insurance devise. Results are...

This paper studies a problem of non linear taxation when individuals have different longevities resulting from a non-monetary effort (like exercising). We first present the laissez-faire and the first best. Like Becker and Philipson (1998), we find that the laissez-faire level of effort is too...

In the expected-utility theory of the monetary value of a statistical life, the so-called "dead-anyway" effect discovered by Pratt and Zeckhauser (1996) asserts that an individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risk increases with the initial level of risk. Their...

The paper introduces a welfarist approach to the national safety of a nation with membership in a defense alliance as an option. The members are risk averse but heterogeneous in their safety classification. There are two public goods as insurance devices, the domestic military budget and the...

The earlier work on the optimal design of the national security has focused on the opportunity cost of the draft in terms of foregone human capital formation. The current paper introduces the national security into the welfare analysis missing from the earlier work. This creates a trade-off...

Managing military operations across and between teams of partner nations remains a first-order challenge to security and development during conflict. NATO, under the umbrella of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), brought together troops from 28 countries to help enhance security...

This paper presents concepts from economic analysis that shed light on the formation and breakup of sovereign states. First, we discuss the key trade-off between economies of scale in the provision of public goods and political costs from heterogeneity of preferences. Second, we present four...

This paper describes the role of government ideology on economic policy-making in the United States. I consider studies using data for the national, state and local level and elaborate on checks and balances, especially divided government, measurement of government ideology and empirical...

We document the importance of local information in mass media for the political engagement of citizens and accountability of politicians. We study this in the context of Canada, where until 1958, competition in television markets was suppressed—Canadians received either public or private...