In previous papers we have shown another interpretation of the irrationality of financial market agents. Another methodology has been proposed. But it also shown that others questions might be highlighted from both epistemological and social welfare point of view. This paper tries to go further...

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...

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 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...

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...

In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-on features, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. Does this product obfuscation lure buyers into buying overpriced products, and if so, why does competition not eliminate this practice? More generally, under which...

The incorporation of increasing returns and imperfect competition into applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models, beginning with Harris (1984), led to much larger welfare effects from changes such as trade liberalization. But the imperfect competition side of these IO developments has often...

We investigate the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native workers. Our analysis is based on the premise that in response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from supervision of production to verification of the legality...

We analyze the efficiency defense in merger control. First, we show that the relationship between exogenous efficiency gains and social welfare can be non-monotone. Second, we consider both endogenous mergers and endogenous efficiencies and find that merger proposals are largely aligned with a...