Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

The long run price elasticity of healthcare spending is critically important to estimating the cost of provision. However, temporary randomized controlled trials may be confounded by transitory effects. This paper shows evidence of a "deadline effect" - a spike in spending in the final year of...

Does ride hailing complement or substitute other forms of transport, such as public transport? I employ Scottish Household Survey travel diary data from 16,712 individuals between 2012 and 2019 in a difference-in-differences examination of how ride hailing affected the use of other transport...

This paper reviews the extent to which policy interventions can affect risky behaviours such as smoking, drinking and diet. The justification for such intervention is typically a market failure, broadly defined. The types of market failure typically encountered are discussed. First and second...

In this paper we address the problem of policy coordination in the electricity sector when the supply side is subject to a carbon constraint. We specifically evaluate the link between retail electricity pricing and GHG emissions reduction. Moreover, we incorporate in the analysis both the...

It is challenging to explain the collapse in the price of subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) during the Financial Crisis of 2008, using the existing models of fire-sale. I present amodel to demonstrate that fire-sales may happen evenwhen there is a relatively sizable pool of natural...

How should a group of people decide to allocate a task that has to be done but is not adequately rewarded? This paper finds an optimal mechanism for the private provision of a public service in an environment without monetary transfers. All members of the group have the same cost of providing...

This paper studies optimal second-best corrective regulation, when some agents/activities cannot be perfectly regulated. We show that policy elasticities and Pigouvian wedges are sufficient statistics to characterize the marginal welfare impact of regulatory policies in a large class of...

We use quantifiers and selection functions to generalize the classical economic approach to choice. Our framework encompasses preference and utility based approaches as special cases, but also extends to non-maximizing behavior and context-dependent motives such as social concerns. We adapt the...