45 it was on the political agenda to create a transparent assessment process, although this idea had been subject to heated debates ever since the beginning of the last century until the 1944 legislation, Sweden’s first Animal Welfare Act (replaced the 1857 “cruelty to animals act”), was settled (Borgström, 2009). Today, there are seven AECs, located at the civil courts of main university towns...

A growing movement in the United States seeks to improve the outcomes achieved by public agencies through performance measurement strategies. In child welfare policy, a federally mandated performance measurement system has evolved since the 1980s, establishing the federal Child and Family Services Review which uses a series of performance indicators for evaluating the child welfare system. This...

Is the observed large increase in consumer indebtedness since the 1980s beneficial for U.S. consumers? This paper quantitatively studies the macroeconomic and welfare implications of relaxing borrowing constraints when consumers exhibit a hyperbolic discounting preference. The model can capture two contrasting views: the positive view, which links increased indebtedness to financial innovation ...

This paper considers the regulation of a natural resource within a dynamic common agency framework. In setting harvest quotas, the regulator responds to lobbying pressure (contributions) from harvesters and conservationists. The truthful Markov perfect equilibrium stock is then an increasing function of the effective political weight for conservationists. Since the contributions to the regulato...

This article examines the welfare consequences of moral hazard, and brings together several arguments suggesting that, in many cases, the additional consumption associated with health insurance could be welfare enhancing. Since conditions for maximum economic efficiency fail to hold in the market for medical care, the theory of the second best is useful. We focus on three efficiency-related rea...

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...

Time Limits: The Effects on Welfare Use and Other Consumption-Smoothing Mechanisms We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation covering the period 19892006 to investigate the impact that time limits on receipt of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families have on female-headed family outcomes, including welfare use, employment and living arrangements. The effects of time limits...

Since their inception in the 1930s, U.S. welfare and income support programs have played an important role in providing benefits to children. Unlike programs directly targeted to children, however, welfare programs are designed to produce economic and employment impacts on adults, so that any effects on children would be indirect. This article explores the influence of such programs on children...

The publication of “The Changing Welfare State in Europe: The Implications for Democracy” was made possible by the participation of the Europe Institute of the University of Auckland in the EU funded FP6 project “Reconstructing Democracy RECON”. The book is a collection of articles written by international scholars examining the transformation of the welfare systems in Europe and beyond since t...

This paper examines the welfare effects of credit and shortsales constraints and limited liability/minimum consumption guarantee in an overlapping generations (OLG) model with rational beliefs in the sense of Kurz (1994). To measure the social welfare, it instead adopts an ex post social welfare concept in the sense of Hammond (1981), since the standard Pareto criterion becomes inappropriate wh...