In the 1960s and 1970s Harrod shifted the emphasis of his research in economic dynamics from the study of business cycles (instability principle) to the investigation of the growth process. As part of that, he restated his concept of the natural growth rate as an optimum welfare rate. The...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

In light of behavioral findings regarding inconsistent individual decision-making, economists have begun to re-conceptualize the notion of welfare. One prominent account is the preference purification approach (PP), which attempts to reconstruct preferences from revealed choices based on a...

A nudge is a paternalistic government intervention that attempts to improve choices by changing the framing of a decision problem. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in spirit to the classical revealed preference approach, by investigating a model where preferences and...

Die vorliegende Studie geht von der These aus, dass das Bruttoinlandsprodukt (BIP) als Wohlstandsmaß nicht geeignet ist und daher zumindest einer Ergänzung bedarf. Ein von den Autoren schon 2009 entwickeltes alternatives Wohlstandsmaß, der Nationale Wohlfahrtsindex (NWI), wird erläutert und...

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...

Gesundheit, Arzneimittel, Wohlfahrtsökonomik, Extra-Welfarismus. - Since 1961 access to market for innovative pharmaceuticals was increasingly regulated. The first step was a simple registration procedure, followed by federal licensing in 1978. Since 1989 the licensing was complemented by price...

Diese Doktorarbeit besteht aus vier Studien, die auf dem Konzept der kausalen Inferenz basieren. Zwei empirische Studien untersuchen, ob eine Abhängigkeit von Wohlfahrtshilfe die Gesundheit und das Gesundheitsverhalten beeinflussen kann. Die beiden restlichen Arbeiten sind methodische Studien...

Dieses Diskussionspapier beleuchtet die PRME-Verpflichtung der Hochschule Pforzheim und die daraus resultierenden Probleme (Abschnitt 2) aus vier Perspektiven: der erkenntnistheoretischen (Abschnitt 3), der erfahrungswissenschaftlichen (Abschnitt 4), der juristischen (Abschnitt 5) und einer...

We propose a formal re-definition of the concept market failure based on the idea of the imperfect state. In the Neo-classical taxonomy, a decentralized regime of exchange is a market failure if its laissez faire equilibrium solution is welfare-dominated by a technically feasible alternative. If...

Distributions of language rights in multilingual settings are analyzed from a normative viewpoint in this chapter. If the cost structure of providing rights is concave in the number of beneficiaries, then a critical-mass criterion for the determination of an optimal rights structure results. It...

In this paper I analyze the PRME-commitment of Pforzheim University and the resulting problems (Section 2) from four different point of views: From the epistemological point of view (Sec-tion 3), from the point of view of empirical sciences (Section 4), from the juridical point of view (Sec-tion...

Introduction: The Age of Responsibility -- The origins of the Age of Responsibility -- The welfare state in the Age of Responsibility -- The denial of responsibility -- Reasons to value responsibility -- A positive conception of responsibility -- Conclusion: Beyond the Age of Responsibility

Introduction: history and economics -- Beginnings -- Ethics, politics, and science -- Bearing fruit as well as light: Pigou's welfare economics -- War, peace, and disillusionment -- Retreat to the ivory tower -- Paradigms lost -- Another war and a fresh start -- To "really do a little good:"a...

Both growth and unevenness in the distribution of housing wealth have become characteristic of advanced societies in recent decades. Housing Wealth and Welfare examines, in various contexts, how housing property ownership has become central both to household wellbeing and to the reshaping of...