An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the “flypaper...

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...

Climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We calibrate a multigenerational model with education, physical capital, knowledge and...

Let there be a positive (exogenous) probability that, at each date, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who maximizes intertemporal welfare under this uncertainty, with expected-utility preferences. Various social welfare criteria entail alternative von...

Why did socialists win elections in some countries in Europe, and fascists in others, during the interwar period? Many political historians have viewed 'distributive class politics' as the appropriate characterization of this period and place, but heretofore, formal politico-economic analysis...

We analyze the reallocations of educational expenditures required to equalize opportunities, according to the theory of Roemer (1998). Using the NLSYM data set, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across men of different races, by using educational finance as the instrument,...

We study the effect of immigration on world welfare. The world consists of two areas, South and North, the former populated by low-skill workers, and the latter by both low and high skill workers. A trade union in the North keeps the wage of low-skill workers above the Walrasian wage, generating...

The Downsian model, in which candidates care only about winning elections and parties play no role, has been hegemonic in formal political theory for forty years. In the past fifteen years, various authors have worked with a model of electoral competition in which competing parties represent...

Consider electoral competition between two candidates, in which there is a single-dimensional issue space. The simplest way to get the result that, in Nash equilibrium, candidates propose different policies, is to assume that (1) candidates are uncertain about the distribution of voter...

Under dictatorship, trade unions and strikes are illegal, and so wages are low and employment is full. Under democracy, there are two institutional innovations: trade unions, which can keep the wage about the Walrasian level, and the citizen franchise, by which citizens may vote transfer...