Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

We estimate the long-term effects of start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants' satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program ("Gründungszuschuss") that...

We consider a tax-funded policy of admitting and integrating asylum seekers in a country in which the incomes of the native inhabitants are differentiated; for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are just two groups of native inhabitants: high-income natives and low-income natives. As a...

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his wellbeing is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the...

In this note we compare the laissez-faire steady-state solution in the Howitt and Aghion (1998) model to the social optimum. The analysis offers several new insights in comparison to the welfare analysis in Aghion and Howitt (1992). We find various new distortions between private and optimal...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...