Through the Hartz reforms, German active labor market policy was fundamentally restructured and has since been systematically evaluated. This paper reviews the recent evaluation findings and draws some conclusions for the future setup of active labor market policies in Germany. It argues in...

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...

Compound and discount factors determine the relationship between present and future values. When interest rates are stochastic, expected compound factors are computed by probability weighting all possible compound factors. It is customary to proceed likewise to compute expected discount factors....

In this paper we present a model designed to relate the detailed occupational and industrial demands imposed on the economy by several types of water resource investment. This detail provides the basis for adjusting the market cost of such public investments under the employment conditions...

This is a critique of the Arthur Maass article on Benefit Cost Analysis.

The Social Time Preference Rate (STPR) correctly measures the rate of fall of the value of future benefits, while the Social Opportunity Cost Rate (SOCR) correctly measures the cost of capital of investment projects, but neither rate can correctly compute net present values (NPV) by itself. This...

The question of choice of social discount rate, which is related to the choice of numeraire in CBA, has been unsettled for decades. The solution lies in using both the social time preference rate (STPR) and the social opportunity cost rate (SOCR) simultaneously but in different roles. There are...