This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard ("behavioral") assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

Market provision of impure public goods such as insurance retirement savings and education is common and growing as policy makers seek to offer more choice and gain efficiencies. This approach induces an important trade-off between improved surplus from matching individuals to products and...

I construct an agency model of local public goods producers with special reference to public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers'...

This chapter surveys work in behavioral public economics, emphasizing the normative implications of non-standard decision making for the design of welfare-improving and/or optimal policies. We highlight combinations of theoretical and empirical approaches that together can produce robust...

We consider an environment in which there is substantial uncertainty about the potential negative external effects of AI algorithms. We find that subjecting algorithm implementation to regulatory approval or mandating testing is insufficient to implement the social optimum. When testing costs...

This paper develops a welfare accounting decomposition that identifies and quantifies the ultimate origins of welfare gains and losses in general economies with heterogeneous individuals and disaggregated production. The decomposition---exclusively based on preferences and technologies---first...

Researchers cannot definitively interpret what the framers of the United States Constitution had in mind when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, welfare economics can contribute to policy choice in democracies. Specifying social welfare functions enables coherent analysis, by...

When studying policy-relevant topics, researchers' policy preferences may shape the design, execution, analysis, and interpretation of results. Detection of such bias is challenging because the research process itself is not normally part of a controlled experimental setting. Our analysis...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...