The interaction between fiscal and monetary policy is analyzed by means of a game theoretical approach. The coordination between those two policies is essential, since decisions taken by one institution may have disastrous effects on the other one, resulting in welfare loss for the society. We derived optimal monetary and fiscal policies in context of three coordination schemes: when each insti...

Welfare Participation by Immigrants in the UK Welfare participation is an important indicator of how successfully immigrants perform in the host country. This paper examines this issue for the UK, which has experienced a large growth in its immigrant flows and population levels in recent years, especially following EU enlargement in 2004. The analysis focuses in particular on the types of benef...

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that t...

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare e¤ects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those e¤ects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to in‡uence the p...

Animal welfare and the ethical issues it raises have been discussed intensively for a couple of decades. The emphasis has been on the direct effects of housing and husbandry, but more attention is now being given to problems originating in selective breeding. European attempts to adjust animal welfare legislation to deal with these problems have been largely unsuccessful, but the fact that sele...

Past climatic changes were caused by a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation. We use results from experiments with three climate models to show that the expected cooling due to a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation is less in magnitude than the expected warming due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The integrated assessment model FUND and a meta-analysis of climate impacts ar...

In most applied cost–benefit analyses, individual willingness to pay (WTP) 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 marginal utility is a cardinal concept, there is no generally accepted way to verify the plausi...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I estimate the relevant correlations between macroeconomic shocks and equity returns from 1874-1996 U.S...

At the turn of the century, the Members of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) decided to include animal welfare in the OIE Strategic Plan for the period 2001 to 2005. This decision reflected the ever-increasing public, media, scientific and political interest in the subject over the previous 50 or so years. Global conferences on animal welfare, held in Paris (2004), Cairo (2008) and...

Integration and collaboration has been an important strategy for development of the health and welfare system in Sweden since the 1960s. This development has been intensified during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. This key note speech will focus on the development of interorganizational collaboration between health care, social service and other welfare services on the local level ...