This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to panel data to estimate utilit...

Market transparency, in its most succint form, refers to the level of current trade information revealed to the public by market makers. We analyze the effect of market transparency on the outcomes of postedoffer style B2B markets under both stationary and non-stationary demand conditions. We find that sellers on average can extract significantly higher surplus than buyers, yet the difference d...

Terrorism has large social costs that are difficult to quantify for the well-known problems of eliciting people’s preferences for public goods. We use the LSA to assess these costs in utility and monetary terms. Based on combined cross-section time-series data, we estimate the costs of terrorism for France and the British Isles. We find large negative effects of terrorism on life satisfaction t...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was fundamentally reformed in 2003. From 2005, farmers will receive decoupled income support payments instead of production premiums if basic standards for environment, food safety, animal health and welfare are met. Farmers are likely to adjust production and management practices to the new policy framework. We describe how this reform fits into the EU stra...

The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the ramifications of economic growth. A “growth dividend” has historically covered the entire interest bill on the ...

Sir,?I observe from page 14 of your last issue that you propose to refer to the subject of Nursing for the Insured in your next number, as the result of a letter appearing in the November issue from the Clerk to the Cheshire Insurance Committee. I think it may be of interest if the experience of another insurance area is made available. Home nursing has been advocated for a very long time, and ...

First, the stage in the demographic transition. Since around the mid-1960s, lower EME fertility rates have meant lower dependency ratios, which has tended to boost saving, and also a rise in the working-age population, which has tended to boost investment. The transition has worked out as predicted in some countries but not in others. In particular, in the aftermath of crises (eg Asia in the la...

The objective of the paper is to compare the effects of two alternative transport pricing rules: average cost and marginal social cost pricing. For both pricing scenarios, two alternative ways of using surpluses or financing deficits of the transport sector are used. The first is to change the marginal labour tax rate, the second way is to vary the level of social transfers. The effects of the ...

Introduction One of the tragic consequences of rice policies in The Gambia over the past twenty years is how severely they undermined the domestic rice sector. Between 1966-1984, international development assistance had promoted irrigation projects on the country's abundant alluvial swamps. The objective was to create surpluses for national demand by growing the second crop by irrigation. Doubl...

This paper uses a mechanism design framework to characterize how an intermediary can design profit-maximizing matching markets when agents have private information about their quality. When match surpluses are supermodular, sufficient conditions are provided that ensure positive assortative matching is profit maximizing. Under these conditions, two-sided position auctions are characterized that...