In this paper I give a critical commentary on the paper by Wiseman, "The political economy of federalism: a critical appraisal". Wiseman's paper has originality which has stood it well over time. I comment briefly on the equity - efficiency debate but concentrate on the aspects of political...

Energy and the environment are inextricably linked: all decisions concerning energy consumption and production have implications for the environment, and environmental policy can impinge on the exploitation of energy resources. In this paper a general agenda is identified for this field of...

We study a market model where there are n different types of indivisible goods for sale. The goods can be substitutable or complementary. There are multiple units of each good. Each agent may consume several goods and has quasi-linear utilities in money. We introduce a general condition which...

This paper measures the degree of inequality of opportunity in birthweight and birthlength for a sample of Irish infants. The sample is partitioned into eight types by mothers’ education and mothers’ smoking status. Stochastic dominance tests reveal the presence of...

Despite the growing prominence of theoretical analysis of inequality of opportunity over the past twenty years, empirical work towards the normative evaluation of real-world policies has been minimal. This paper seeks to address this issue. It proposes a normative framework to model the...

This paper employs a conditional quantile regression approach to examine the roles of family SES, early childhood life-events, unobserved heterogeneity and pure state dependence in explaining the distribution of depression among adolescents and young adults using data on the children of the US...

We assess the extent to which specialist doctors respond to local competition when setting prices (including extra-billings) in a fee-for-service system. We use an exhaustive panel data set to estimate physician reaction functions, exploiting exogenous changes in medical density and labor supply...

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people’s mental wellâ€Âbeing in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantly increased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action...