A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

We provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of variation in suicide impulsivity by age by examining the impact of firearm purchase delay laws by age. Prior studies of firearm purchase delay laws use traditional two-way-fixed-effects estimation, but we demonstrate that bias due to...

Using a logistic model of cumulative cases and deaths it would soon become possible to give estimates to the final numbers of cases and deaths that are likely on account of COVID19, for countries which have gone through about 60+ days since the first cases were recorded. Such estimates assume...

Child well-being is inextricably linked to the performance of the macroeconomy. Although not always explicit, there are very clear and powerful channels that need to be understood, monitored and linked to decision-making processes, including economic growth, labour markets, price levels and the...

Societies can benefit from the delivery of inclusive education, lifelong learning as well as from active labour market policies. Therefore, this paper reviews the relevant literature on the provision of quality education for social cohesion. Afterwards, it analyses the latest socio-economic...

Renewed policy-maker interest in the potentialities for interaction between private pensions and accelerated SOE privatisations rarely represents genuinely strategic thinking. Current policy sequencing seems significantly misplaced, most particularly in their focus on the prioritised stimulation...

On March 11, 2011 the strongest recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant Station. The triple 2011 disaster has had immense impacts on people life, health and property, social infrastructure and...