When economists turned to applied benefit-cost analysis in the 1930s and 1940s, they adopted prices as indicators of benefits. This was consistent with both neoclassical economics (in which prices are marginal values) and institutional economics (which favored a plausible market mechanism to...

Recent tobacco regulations proposed by the Food and Drug Administration have raised a thorny question: how should the cost-benefit analysis accompanying such policies value foregone consumer surplus associated with regulation-induced reductions in smoking? In a model with rational and fully...

Recent tobacco regulations proposed by the Food and Drug Administration have raised a thorny question: how should the cost-benefit analysis accompanying such policies value foregone consumer surplus associated with regulation-induced reductions in smoking? In a model with rational and fully...

This paper clarifies Dupuit's intention of justifying the building of public goods, and derives a new calculation scheme for CBA to support him. The reverse of the CBA logic offers significant measure of deadweight loss due to monopoly. Dupuit would condemn those economists arguing to use toll...

We investigate the sensitivity of consumer surplus estimates to parametric assumptions on individual preference heterogeneity in a discrete choice framework. We compare results from a parametric random coefficients logit model and a recently proposed nonparametric sieve estimator. In particular,...