A recent study of the welfare state in Sweden, Rosen (1995, 1996, 1997), concludes that child care subsidies may lead to substantial deadweight losses that may impede economic growth and the future of the welfare state. In this article we show that the deadweight losses are highly sensitive to...

The European Union (EU) identified some positive and negative externalities related to energy production and consumption when adopting its Renewable Energy and Climate Change Package. Given these externalities, we derive the optimal combination of policy instruments. Thereafter, we explore the...

Energy generated from land-based wind power is expected to play a crucial role in the decarbonisation of the economy. With the looming biodiversity and nature crises, spatial allocation of wind power cannot, however, any longer be considered solely a trade-off against local disamenity costs....

We develop a flexible single-state model to represent tradeoffs between infections and activity during the early phase of an epidemic. We prove that optimal policy is continuous in the state but discontinuous in the deterministic arrival date of a cure; optimal lockdowns are followed by stimulus...

On the one hand, wind power production is necessary for decarbonizing the electricity sector. On the other hand, we risk replacing one environmental problem with other environmental problems, that is, stopping climate change in exchange with increased loss of pristine land and biodiversity. The...

Data from a farm survey and choice experiment are used to value the benefits of Bt cotton in Pakistan. Unlike previous research on the economic impacts of Bt, which mostly concentrated on financial benefits in terms of gross margins, we also quantify and monetize positive externalities...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians\' behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We...

We consider the problem of efficient emission abatement in a multi polluter setting, where agents are located along a river in which net emissions accumulate and induce negative externalities to downstream riparians. Assuming a cooperative transferable utility game, we seek welfare distributions...

In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer, judging matters from society's point of view. It is not clear which of these possibly conflicting roles respondents in contingent valuation studies take on. This leads...

In most applied cost-benefit analyses, individual willingness to pay is aggregated without using explicit welfare weights. This can be justified by postulating a utilitarian social welfare function, along with the assumption of equal marginal utility of income for all individuals. However, since...