We specify the optimal level of copyright protection for an individual producer and the society as a whole. For an individual producer, the optimal level is (i) no protection, (ii) the level under which the producer’s overall profit net of the development cost is zero, or (iii) full protection. The optimal level for the society, on the other hand, critically depends on the distribution of firms...

The concept of preference dominates economic theory today. It performs a triple duty for economists, grounding their theories of individual behavior, welfare, and rationality. Microeconomic theory assumes that individuals act so as to maximize their utility ± that is, to maximize the degree to which their preferences are satisfied. Welfare economics defines individual welfare in terms of prefer...

privatization advocates believe that transfer to private sector increases firm’s performance and value, business environment, and therefore economic growth and welfare improves. in this research, by using the 70 accepted firms in the tehran stock exchange for the period of 2005 to 2009, we investigate the effect of firm’s ownership structure on their value by applying generalized method of mome...

This research sheds light onto the effects of welfare policies on anti-immigration attitudes by focusing on qualitative differences in these policies over time. Previous studies provide little evidence that welfare policies affect levels of anti-immigration attitudes because they view the welfare state in an overly abstract manner in relation to attitudes toward immigration. From this viewpoint...

Many economists have argued that income is an inadequate indicator of welfare. In this paper, we conduct a multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual welfare in China at three selected time points: 1991, 1997 and 2006. Instead of using income as the only welfare indicator as in most distributional analyses, we explicitly consider the role of health in welfare distribution. We adopt...

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful taxbenefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function – typically inequality or poverty indices – of household equivalized income. In parallel, economic research has made considerable progress i...

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of every individual’s expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the ci...

We study equity in economies where a set of agents commonly own a technology producing a non-rival good from their private contributions. A social ordering function associates to each economy a complete ranking of the allocations. We build social ordering functions satisfying the property that individual welfare levels exceeding a legitimate upper bound should be reduced. Combining that propert...

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple econometric model to study this problem and estimate it using data on small employers. We find a welfare loss of 2-11 percent ...

The juvenile court judge occupies a unique position. Like all other judges, the juvenile court judge must apply the law to resolve a dispute. For juvenile court judges handling abuse and neglect cases, however, the law requires a new type of role. The judge must monitor whether child welfare agencies have provided services to individual children and families sufficient to comply with federal an...