This paper examines the economic foundations of some recently proposed criteria for evaluating the benefits of social programs. These criteria are appropriate for comparing a class of revenue-constant policies. They replace foundational principles of social opportunity costs with accounting...

A variety of criteria are relevant for evaluating alternative policies in democratic societies composed of persons with diverse values and perspectives. In this paper, we consider alternative criteria for evaluating the welfare state, and the data required to operationalize them. We examine sets...

"This paper studies the cycles of nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies. We discuss available evidence on the drivers and consequences of privatization and nationalization, review the existing literature, and present illustrative case studies. Our main contribution is then...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

This paper explores the implications of the European single currency within a simple sticky price intertemporal model. The main issue we focus on is how the euro may alter the responsiveness of consumer prices to exchange rate changes. Our central conjectures is that the acceptance of the euro...

The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This...

We study the consequences of hospital competition for Medicare beneficiaries' heart attack care from 1985 to 1994. We examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets, and how hospital competition...

We explore the effects of environmental taxes that imprecisely target pollution. A review of actual policies indicates few (if any) examples of a true tax on pollution. More typically, environmental taxes target an input or output that is correlated with pollution. We construct a simple...