This paper examines the economic foundations of three criteria used for evaluating the costs and benefits of social programs. Some criteria do not consider the scale of programs or address the costs associated with programs that expand or contract the total government budget. A recent addition...

Economists have long studied policy choice by a social planner who aims to maximize welfare in democracies or other political systems where, in some sense, welfare is intended to express the well-being of a society rather than the personal preferences of a dictator. The motivation for studying...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...

Prior to around 2011, there was a pronounced curvilinear relationship between age and wellbeing: poor mental health was hump-shaped with respect to age, whilst subjective well-being was U-shaped. We examine data from a European panel for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden called,...

We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and employment) of families and children with very low incomes. We use a parameterized difference-in-differences...

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited...

Across many studies subjective well-being follows a U-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age. The reason for the...

This paper describes an efficiency approach to the evaluation of policy changes. Rather than comparing the utility allocations that arise before and after a policy change is introduced, this approach evaluates a policy change by comparing it with other possible changes which might be made from...

The growing application of cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis and controversies about its methods has led to a need to explore its welfare economic foundations. Examination of its welfare theoretic foundations can provide a rationale for selecting specific standards for the application of CE...

The welfare economic method for analyzing the case for government intervention is often criticized for ignoring the political determination of policies. While many economists accept the thrust of this critique, exactly when and how political determination interferes with a welfare economic...