Vaccination promotes animal welfare by protecting animal health, but it also has other welfare benefits, e.g. recent investigations have looked at the potential of vaccines in immunoneutering such as immunocastration--a humane alternative to the painful traditional methods. Similarly, vaccination can be used during disease outbreaks as a viable alternative to stamping-out, thus avoiding the wel...

Economists explain welfare dependency of the unemployed and in-work poverty by the low labour market quality of the poor. Work can be made to pay by working family tax credits. But these might lower wages and price nonrecipients out of the market, widening the eligibility for the wage supplementation and raising social welfare bills. This was precisely the effect of the Speenhamland system of w...

We examine the welfare effect of the presence of a single well-informed insurance firm in a competitive insurance market populated by uninformed firms. We show that the effect depends on the structure of the market. If competitive insurers rely on the standard self-selection mechanism of a menu of contracts, then the presence of a single wellinformed firm which can discriminate costlessly betwe...

In this paper we analyse the effects of microfinance programs upon household welfare in Vietnam. Our analytical framework builds upon the rural household models of Singh et al. (1986) and Rosenzweig (1990). Data on 470 households across 25 villages was collected using a quasiexperiment survey approach to overcome self-selection bias. In our econometric analysis the welfare effects of microfinan...