This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children’s rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence of making child-rearing less desirable for some parents and thereby...

Brennan and Hamlin provide a normative justification for dispositional conservatism based on the concave value functions which give rise to quasi-risk aversion. This note modifies this argument for “analytic conservatism” by allowing jurisdictional exit in response to institutional decline....

We review methods and assess the policy influence of a series of publiclyfunded Cost of Illness studies, mostly published since 1990. Our analysis shows that headline cost estimates, including the influential paper by Collins and Lapsley (2008), depend on an incorrect procedure for incorporating...

This paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities...

This paper demonstrates the compatibility of three supposedly different approaches to political science. Concentrating upon `new institutionalism' it demonstrates that, by discarding theoretically untenable aspects, the fundamental truths of institutional analysis fit perfectly with both...

The paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the purported paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a focal account of normatively desirable capabilities constitutive...