361,228 research outputs found
Is more health always better? Exploring public preferences that violate monotonicity
AbĂĄsolo and Tsuchiya (2004a) report on an empirical study to elicit public preferences regarding the efficiency-equality trade-off in health, where the majority of respondents violated monotonicity. The procedure used has been subject to criticisms regarding potential biases in the results. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether violation of monotonicity remains when a revised questionnaire is used. We test: whether monotonicity is violated when we allow for inequality neutral preferences and also if we allow for preferences that would reject any option which gives no health gain to one group; whether those who violate monotonicity actually have non-monotonic or Rawlsian preferences; whether the titration sequence of the original questionnaire may have biased the results; whether monotonicity is violated when an alternative question is administered. Finally, we also test for symmetry of preferences. The results confirm the evidence of the previous study regarding violation of monotonicity
Descriptive versus Prescriptive Discounting in Climate Change Policy Analysis
This paper distinguishes between five different approaches to social discount rates in climate change economics, criticizes two of these, and explains how the other three are to some degree mutually compatible. It aims to shed some new light on a longstanding debate in climate change economics between so-called âdescriptivistsâ and âprescriptivistsâ about social discounting. The ultimate goal is to offer a sketch of the conceptual landscape that makes visible some important facets of the debate that very often go unacknowledged
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Trade openness and the settlement of domestic disputes in the shadow of the future
© 2015 University of Venice. We explore the severity of an ongoing dispute over a productive resource within a country that participates in world trade. In addition to arming, the contending groups in our setting choose either to engage in destructive conflict or to settle their dispute peacefully. Our central objective is to characterize the conditions under which the dispute might be resolved peacefully instead of violently. The analysis underscores the intuitive roles played by the destructiveness of open conflict and the salience of the future that have been identified in the previous literature, but it also provides some novel insights into how world prices and trade openness matter. Among other things, we find that, given conflict's destructive effects and time preferences, settlement is most likely to be supported as a stable equilibrium when the "traditional" gains from trade are largest. However, there also exist circumstances under which increased trade openness can induce destructive conflict
Set-Monotonicity Implies Kelly-Strategyproofness
This paper studies the strategic manipulation of set-valued social choice
functions according to Kelly's preference extension, which prescribes that one
set of alternatives is preferred to another if and only if all elements of the
former are preferred to all elements of the latter. It is shown that
set-monotonicity---a new variant of Maskin-monotonicity---implies
Kelly-strategyproofness in comprehensive subdomains of the linear domain.
Interestingly, there are a handful of appealing Condorcet extensions---such as
the top cycle, the minimal covering set, and the bipartisan set---that satisfy
set-monotonicity even in the unrestricted linear domain, thereby answering
questions raised independently by Barber\`a (1977) and Kelly (1977).Comment: 14 page
Labor supply models: unobserved heterogeneity, nonparticipation and dynamics
This chapter is concerned with the identification and estimation of models of labor supply. The focus is on the key issues that arise from unobserved heterogeneity, nonparticipation and dynamics. We examine the simple âstaticâ labor supply model with proportional taxes and highlight the problems surrounding nonparticipation and missing wages. The difference in differences
approach to estimation and identification is developed within the context of the labour supply model. We also consider the impact of incorporating nonlinear taxation and welfare programme participation. Family labor supply is looked at from botht e unitary and collective persepctives.
Finally we consider intertemporal models focusing on the difficulties that arise with participation and heterogeneity
Modelling welfare effects of a liberalisation of the Dutch electricity market
The Dutch electricity sector has traditionally been dominated by the public sector. Although this organisational structure resulted in a reliable and low-priced system, it is said not to be completely stable and efficient. National and international developments stimulate the introduction of a liberalised system. In this article, we present the model NEDMOD which is used to estimate possible welfare gains of an implementation of a liberalised market system in the Dutch electricity market
Ethics of the scientist qua policy advisor: inductive risk, uncertainty, and catastrophe in climate economics
This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the economic effects of climate change, and how climate economists acting as policy advisors ought to represent the uncertain possibility of catastrophe. Some climate economists, especially Martin Weitzman, have argued for a precautionary approach where avoiding catastrophe should structure climate economistsâ welfare analysis. This paper details ethical arguments that justify this approach, showing how Weitzmanâs âfat tailâ probabilities of climate catastrophe pose ethical problems for widely used IAMs. The main claim is that economists who ignore or downplay catastrophic risks in their representations of uncertainty likely fall afoul of ethical constraints on scientists acting as policy advisors. Such scientists have duties to honestly articulate uncertainties and manage (some) inductive risks, or the risks of being wrong in different ways
Making Social Work Work: Improving social work for vulnerable families and children without parental care around the world: A literature review
This literature review calls for families and children in developing countries to be supported in ways that are appropriate to the conditions, culture and resources available rather than through approaches to social work that are common in the west. Children living without, or at risk of losing, parental care have wide and varied needs, this paper highlights the need for more thorough assessments of appropriate approaches, functions and support needs for social workers, and suggests elements of an assessment tool to explore these issues. This paper is the first part of a longer process for developing such an assessment tool, and plans are underway to further develop and test the tool in 2012.- See more at: http://www.everychild.org.uk/resources/reports-policies/making-social-work-work#sthash.4EF6qnzc.dpu
Ambiguity Aversion behind the Veil of Ignorance
The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi's and Rawls' that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent's behind the veil are averse to ambiguity. Allowing for aversion to ambiguity---which is both the most commonly observed and a seemingly reasonable attitude to ambiguity---however supports a version of Egalitarianism, whose logical form is quite different from the theories defended by the aforementioned authors. Moreover, it turns out that the veil of ignorance argument neither supports standard Utilitarianism nor Prioritarianism unless we assume that rational people are insensitive to ambiguity
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