The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is notoriously insensitive to distributional concerns, favoring a policy with a positive sum of monetary equivalents, even if better-off individuals are benefitted at the expense of worse-off ones. This problem is sometimes mitigated, in practice, by monetizing goods...

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health?...

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using...

Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. “Ideal-advisor” accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a...

Prioritarianism is the ethical view that gives greater weight to well-being changes affecting individuals at lower well-being levels. This view is influential both in moral philosophy, and in theoretical work on social choice — where it is captured by a social welfare function (“SWF”)...

Two important developments in recent policy analysis are behavioral economics and subjective-well-being (SWB) surveys. What is the connection between them? Some have suggested that behavioral economics strengthens the case for SWB surveys as a central policy tool, e.g., in the form of SWB-based...

This paper examines consumption decisions under risk assuming a prioritarian social welfare function, namely, a concave transformation of individual utility functions. Under standard assumptions, there is always more current consumption under ex ante prioritarianism than under utilitarianism....

De minimis cutoffs are a familiar feature of risk regulation. This includes the quantitative individual risk thresholds for fatality risks employed in many contexts by EPA, FDA, and other agencies, such as the 1-in-1 million lifetime cancer risk cutoff; extreme event cutoffs for addressing natural...

Contemporary positivism has taken a communitarian turn. Hart, in the Postscript to quot;The Concept of Law,quot; clarifies that the rule of recognition is a special sort of social practice: a convention. It is not clear whether Hart, here, means convention in the strict sense elaborated by David...