Analysis of the equity premium puzzle has focused on private sector capital markets. The object of this paper is to consider the welfare and policy implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle. As would be expected, the greater the deviation from the first-best outcome implied by a given explanation of the equity premium puzzle, the more interventionist...

Follow this and additional works at: http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div2facpubs Part of the Administrative Law Commons, Community Engagement Commons, Comparative Politics Commons, Education Policy Commons, Law and Society Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Administration Commons, Public Policy Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, ...

The present paper outlines and analyzes Australia’s welfare reform policies as they have been implemented over the past decade. While there have been numerous social policy initiatives over this period, welfare reform provides an interesting site for analysis and review. This suite of policies and programs is of particular importance from several standpoints. First, its target groups – those ne...

The ultimate aim of (economic) policy is to enhance social welfare. In an ideal world with perfect competition, no externalities and transaction costs, and with a perfect distribution of property rights, the optimal path of social welfare is reached automatically when all individuals maximise their own welfare. There is no need for coordination by the government since the market mechanism will ...

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

In this paper we study growth and welfare effects of fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model with public capital and environmental pollution. As to pollution we assume that it is due to aggregate production. Pollution does not have direct effects as concerns production possibilities but it only reduces utility of the household. The paper then studies growth effects of fiscal policy for the ...