We model the labor market impact of the key provisions of the national and Massachusetts "mandate-based" health reforms: individual mandates, employer mandates, and subsidies. We characterize the compensating differential for employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) and the welfare impact of reform in terms of "sufficient statistics." We compare welfare under mandate-based reform to welfare i...

We measure the earnings and welfare losses experienced by displaced employees of the Ecuadorian Central Bank (BCE), and link these losses to individual characteristics such as age, gender, education, seniority and wage in the public sector. Data are from a survey of BCE employees we ran fifteen to eighteen months after separation, including subjective evaluations of well-being in addition to in...

OBJECTIVE To describe the satisfaction with working hours and satisfaction with work-life balance and their association in the European Union (EU-28). METHOD This is a cross-sectional study based on data from the Flash Eurobarometer 398 among workers of the EU-28 from 2014 (n=13,683). We calculated percentages and their 95% confidence intervals (95%CI). We also applied a multi-level generalis...

There is increasing public concern about the welfare implications of confinement housing systems for farm animals. Gestation stalls are a common method of housing pregnant swine in the USA. Single housing of pregnant sows in stalls and on tethers has been criticized because these systems severely restrict females’ freedom of movement. However, single housing allows easy individual control of fe...

Several recent technological standards have been accompanied by patent pools – arrangements to license multiple patentholders’ relevant intellectual property as a package. A key distinction made by regulators – between patents essential to a standard and patents with substitutes – has not been addressed in the theoretical literature. I show that pools of essential patents are always welfare-pos...

Consumers are commonly required to subscribe to particular tariff options before uncertainty regarding their future purchases gets resolved. Since the general comparison of welfare performance of different pricing mechanisms is ambiguous, this paper empirically evaluates the expected welfare associated to standard nonlinear pricing and optional tariffs by using information directly linked to th...

The Use of Welfare by Migrants in Italy A large part of the Italian welfare system is designed and implemented at the very local level, leading to a high degree of heterogeneity in the type and the generosity of available programs across the country. As a consequence, studies of welfare use based on standard household surveys may fail to consider a large part of welfare recipients and provision...

The prevention of poor welfare in the animals that we use is one of our moral obligations. Systems for producing farm animals are not sustainable unless people accept the system and its effects and one of the criteria for this is the welfare of the animals. The welfare of an animal is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment. In order that welfare can be good, the needs of...

A different branch embraces interpersonal comparability. Many welfare economists, in various subfields such as optimal tax theory, growth theory, public finance, environmental economics, and social choice theory, employ “social welfare functions” (SWF) as a key tool. Let x, y, z, ... denote different possible outcomes, i.e., states of affairs. The SWF methodology assigns a utility number to eac...

In this research I integrate the theory of welfare stigma (Moffitt, 1983) and the theory of optimal income taxation. I study optimal income taxation and an optimal welfare program within a unified framework, taking welfare stigma into account. In the framework, I assume that the government has two policy instruments: general income taxation and a welfare program. I assume that individuals are h...