This paper discusses how a benevolent policy maker should act based on some, possibly non-welfaristic,ethical principle in cases where people's preferences are not perfectly informed,consistent and fully developed with regard to all goods, including all kinds of environmental goods, as is...

Using a contingent valuation survey, people’s willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from...

This paper undertakes a social cost-benefit analysis regarding an increase in the number of electric vehicles in the Swedish transport sector by year 2010. Battery cars are generally found to be socially unprofitable, even though their private life-cycle costs and external costs are lower than...

Many argue that it is socially inefficient to use distributional weights in cost-benefit analysis, and that doing so implies large inefficiency losses,when distributional matters can be dealt with trough income taxation, instead. Our results question this view, by showing a large range of cases...

Kaplow (1996) and others argue forcefully in favor of using the standard cost-benefit test alone, without any distributional concern, given “standard simplifying assumptions.” This paper, on the contrary, demonstrates that distributional weights, equal to the social marginal utility of...

Global environmental problems are often assumed to imply extensive inefficiencies since there is no global authority corresponding to the government at a national level. This paper shows, on the contrary, that rich countries in a free unregulated market may still undertake globally efficient...

This paper analyzes the standard welfare economics assumption of anthropocentric welfarism, i.e., that only human well-being counts intrinsically. Alternatives where animal welfare matters intrinsically are explored theoretically, based on moral philosophical literature, and empirically where...

Welfare economics relies on consequentialism even though many philosophers have questioned this assumption. Survey evidence, based on a representative sample in Sweden, is presented here suggesting that most people’s ethical perceptions are consistent with consequentialism.

This paper analyses normative implications of relaxing the conventional welfare economics assumptions anthropocentrism and welfarism, i.e. that only human well-being counts intrinsically, combined with various types of non-selfish individual preferences. Social decision rules are derived for the...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s risk-perceptions are often systematically biased. This paper develops a simple framework to analyse public policy when this is the case. Expected utility (well-being) is shown to depend on both objective and subjective risks. The latter are important...