Rules often are complex in order to distinguish different types of behavior that may have different consequences. Greater complexity thus allows better control of behavior. But individuals may need to incur costs ex ante to determine how more complex rules apply to their contemplated conduct....

Whether and how estates and gifts should be taxed has long been a controversial subject, and the approach to estate and gift taxation varies among developed countries. Arguments for and against various forms of transfer taxation have focused on concerns about the distribution of income and...

Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett offer a new measure of horizontal equity (HE) that is designed to overcome deficiencies in prior indexes. There is, however, a fundamental problem that their effort shares with their predecessors' attempts: the underlying rationale for pursuing HE at the expense...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of discrepancy by race and ethnicity in college attendance. When the returns to college education rose, college enrollment of whites responded much more quickly than that of minorities. Parental income is a...

This paper considers the problem of policy evaluation in a modern society with heterogeneous agents and diverse groups with conflicting interests. Several different approaches to the policy evaluation problem are compared including the approach adopted in modern welfare economics, the classical...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle

This paper considers the optimal tax treatment of voluntary transfers to individuals in a" framework that integrates redistributive income taxation and estate and gift taxation. Under this" formulation, redistributive considerations become secondary. The optimal tax treatment of" transfers...

This is a survey of the field of economic analysis of law, focusing on the work of economists. The survey covers the three central areas of civil law liability for accidents (tort law), property law, and contracts as well as the litigation process and public enforcement of law

This paper formulates and estimates an open-economy overlapping generation general-equilibrium model of endogenous heterogeneous human capital in the form of schooling and on-the-job training. Physical capital accumulation is also analyzed. We use the model to explain rising wage inequality in...

A variety of criteria are relevant for evaluating alternative policies in democratic societies composed of persons with diverse values and perspectives. In this paper, we consider alternative criteria for evaluating the welfare state, and the data required to operationalize them. We examine sets...