The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) is a framework that can be used to select welfare program eligibility policies based on data. This paper extends EWM by allowing for uncertainty in estimating the budget needed to implement the selected policy, in addition to its welfare. Due to the...

Literature has frequently evaluated the proliferation of preferential trade agreement (PTAs) by counting the number of PTAs or the share of international trade covered by these agreements. But these indicators havebeen recently criticized. This article, using a Computable General Equilibrium...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

If satisfaction with life (SWL) is used to measure individual wellbeing, the dispersion of its distribution offers a comprehensive measure of inequality that subsumes the many and various component forms of inequality in particular domains. The cross-country correlation between the level of SWL...

This paper develops a Bertrand Price Competition model with differentiated goods in which export subsidies are compared to exchange rate depreciation as different government policies for promoting exports. National governments may wish to help domestic firms to expand market shares in profitable...

The conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

This paper presents a characterization of a welfare index for the evaluation of primary goods (to be understood as those goods that all agents should enjoy equally). The welfare associated with a given distribution of n primary goods among m agents is measured as the sum of n real-valued...