The aim of this paper is to understand the interactions between productive effort and the creation of synergies that are the sources of technological collaboration agreements, agglomeration, and social interactions. We model this interaction in a way that allows us to characterize how agents devote resources to both activities. This permits a full-fledged equilibrium/welfare analysis of network...

The study of individual happiness has enriched economics with many new and sometimes challenging (preliminary) insights.1 More and more often, it is asked about the policy consequences that are to be derived from these insights. We observe that economic research on happiness has an explicit or implicit tendency to follow a “benevolent dictator” approach where the government, and individual poli...

The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income is infeasible. This paper develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assi...

In coalition formation with self-interested agents both social welfare of the multi-agent system and stability of individual coalitions must be taken into account. However, in large-scale systems with thousands of agents, finding an optimal solution with respect to both metrics is infeasible. In this paper we propose an approach for finding coalition structures with suboptimal social welfare an...

This paper analyzes the welfare use of Turkish immigrants and natives in Germany. After a brief description of the system of minimum income protection and its recent reform we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study to investigate the correlates of transfer receipt for the two subsamples. Immigrants of Turkish origin have a higher propensity to use welfare benefits than natives. Aft...

The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of weaknesses are considered in this paper: social-welfare arrangements are often not financially robus...

The acceptability of the Nash Social Welfare Function is questioned because a minute (perhaps hardy perceivable) werfare change of;someone with a very low welfare level might overwhelm enormous welfare changes of others. The axiomatic derivation of the Nash S WF by Kaneko and Nakamura is analyzed. Arguments for and against social welfare as separable in, linear in, and an unweighted sum of indi...

We develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms: an individual mandate. We identify a set of key parameters for welfare analysis, allowing us to model the welfare impact of the actual policy as well as to estimate the socially optimal penalty level. Using data from Massachusetts, we estimate the key parameters of the model. We compare health insurance co...

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals (inter-individual redistribution) reducing annual, cross-sectional inequality and over the lifecycle of an individual (intra-individual redistribution) insuring individuals against income risks in the long-term. But studies measuring redistribution often focus on a one-year period and the second aspect is neglected. To quantify both interand ...