Several ``Paretian'' welfare rules are equivalent when policymakers know agents' characteristics, e.g., a policy is optimal if (a) any other policy making someone better o ̈ harms some agent, or (b) it is the maximum of some social welfare function. This paper extends these and other rules to environments where policymakers have a probability distribution over a state space of possible models. U...

OBJECTIVE To explore with UK and international policy advisors how research evidence influences public health policy making, and how its relevance and utility could be improved, with specific reference to the evidence on the production and reduction of health inequalities. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Qualitative residential workshop involving senior policy advisors with a substantive ro...

To the extent of my knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to subject relative income under political economy analysis. The paper will introduce a utility function that includes relative income which will drives our models. According to the model, income distribution will coincide with wage distribution under specific assumptions. An intervention in income distribution may help agents to co...

The study of community attitudes toward welfare and welfare recipients is an area of increasing interest. This is not only because negative attitudes can lead to stigmatization and discrimination, but because of the relevance of social attitudes to policy decisions. We quantify the attitudes toward welfare in the Australian population using attitude data from a nationally representative survey ...

Given structural shifts in the economy, optimal simple monetary policy rules may respond with switches in their policy parameters. When the growth rate, inter-temporal preferences, or volatilities switch, the monetary authority chooses regime-dependent policy parameters to maximize welfare. These optimized policy parameters may differ across regimes and from the optimal choice of parameters for...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and fiscal policy rules in a real business cycle model augmented with sticky prices, a demand for money, taxation, and stochastic government consumption. We consider simple feedback rules whereby the nominal interest rate is set as a function of output and inflation, and taxes are set as a function of total government liabilities. We implement a s...

The British welfare state is over 60 years old. Those who were born, grew up and who are now growing old within its ambit are a distinctive generation. They have enjoyed healthier childhoods with better education than previous populations living in Britain. That they have done well under the welfare state is accepted, but some critics have argued that these advantages are at the expense of youn...

I study the long-run economic effects of a policy of deporting undocumented immigrants. To evaluate such a policy, I develop a dynamic spatial growth model featuring migration, endogenous innovation, and economic geography. Using this framework, I simulate various deportation policy scenarios for the United States and quantify gains and losses in welfare and real wages, both in the aggregate an...

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national con...