Economists typically evaluate policies based on how such policies affect individuals' utilities. We follow this approach by taking a welfarist view of the USA's espoused policy of promoting liberty in other parts of the world. However, we take a nuanced view by investigating the type of welfare...

Recent theoretical work shows that precautionary savings increase in response to an increase in first-order risk. In addition, it is known that the welfare state, being an insurance or consumption-smoothing mechanism, reduces the negative welfare effect of future income uncertainty. We build a...