Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? We answer this question by providing bounds on welfare that hold for families of demand curves commonly considered in different...

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a price theoretic model of information design that allows empiricists to identify the...

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a price theoretic model of information design that allows empiricists to identify the...

There is a growing momentum to base the poverty line on total consumption expenditure as it is a better measure of welfare. This chapter explores three related approaches to measuring household welfare that together represent an alternative ‘inductive’ measuring approach. We focus on...

The complexity of the modern world imposes significant cognitive and material costs on consumers. This paper models decision costs to better describe and understand the effects of behavioural policy, and finds that, similar to traditional economic policy, behavioural policies can create welfare...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting specific individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage less...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting specific individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage less...