This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The project explored the linkages between industry dynamics and economic activity, and the macro-congestion aspects of freight transport. The Kia Motors manufacturing plant near West Point, Georgia was selected for case study. The principal study effort went into collecting data elements in...

In “A Critical Look at the Economic Argument for Taxing Only Labor Income,” I challenge the tax substitution argument, which according to accepted wisdom fairly establishes that it is best to tax only labor earnings. A portion of Critical Look is directed at Professors Bankman and Weisbach's...

U.S. public and private debt is traced to the decision of the First Congress in 1790 to borrow the new nation's money supply. This established a debt imperative that requires debt to grow by compounding interest. When debt fails to grow enough, the economy goes into various degrees of recession....

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...

Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary choice...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

A large and growing literature shows that decision-makers are more likely to select options presented to them as the default. We study the optimal choice of defaults. Our model assumes that decision-makers behave as if there is some cost to selecting any option that is not the default. These...

I review the complex welfare economic issues that arise in environmental decision-making over very long periods, as in cases relating to climate change and biodiversity loss. I also consider the issues that arise in choosing a discount rate to apply to very long-run projects and indicate how...

Bitcoin has enabled competition between digital cryptocurrencies and traditional legal tender fiat currencies. Despite rapidly increasing acceptance, so far the affirmation of cryptocurrency as better money has been thwarted by dramatic deflationary price instability. Successful at disposing of...