In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen's willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of occupational training programs for the unemployed before and after the substantial amendments in German labor market legislation known as Hartz reforms. Based on the official evaluation of the reforms, we show that program impacts vary much across...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? The long-term nature of public investments provides commitment to current preferences, which justifies lower than private returns for time-inconsistent decision markers. An...

This paper examines implications of limits to substitution for estimating substitutability between ecosystem services and manufactured goods and for social discounting. Based on a model that accounts for a subsistence requirement in the consumption of ecosystem services, we provide empirical...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...

In diesem Beitrag werden erstens positive Zahlungsbereitschaften für sportliche Erfolge der deutschen Mannschaft bei den Olympischen Winterspielen 2014 in Sotschi untersucht und zweitens die positive oder auch negative Zahlungsbereitschaft für die Austragung Olympischer Spiele in Deutschland....

Climate change not only impacts production and market consumption, but also the relative scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities. We study fundamental drivers of the resulting relative price changes, their potential magnitude, and their implications for climate policy in...

To determine the amount of environmental goods and services to provide or preserve, it is necessary to weigh society's degree of preference for the environment vis-à-vis other goods and services. This value measure serves to inform the decision-making and policy-making process and thereby...