In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust to controls that take account of the fact that response time might be affected by the decision-maker’s cognitive ability and swiftness. The experiment was conducted with a large and heterogeneous sample recruited from the general population in Denmark. We find a striking similarity in the association between response time and fair behavior across groups in the society, which suggests that the predisposition to act fairly is a general human trait.

Some regulations do not only reduce human deaths, injuries, and illnesses; they also protect nonhuman animals. Regulatory Impact Analyses, required by prevailing executive orders, usually do not disclose or explore benefits or costs with respect to nonhuman animals, even when those benefits or costs are significant. This is an inexcusable gap. If a regulation prevents dogs, horses, or cats from being killed or hurt, the benefits should be specified and quantified. This proposition holds even if those benefits are in some sense incidental to the main goal of the regulation. At the same time, turning the relevant benefits into monetary equivalents raises serious challenges, akin to those raised by the valuation of statistical children.

Animal welfare is often ignored in decision-making, despite widespread agreement about its importance. This is partly because of a lack of quantitative methods to assess the impacts of policies on humans and nonhumans alike on a common scale. At the same time, recent work in economics, philosophy, and animal welfare science has made progress on the fundamental theoretical challenge of estimating the well-being potential of different species on a single scale. By combining these estimates of each species’ well-being potential with assessments of how various policies impact the quality of life for these species, along with the number of animals affected, we can arrive at a framework for estimating the impact of policies on animal health and well-being. This framework allows for a quantifiable comparison between policies affecting humans and animals. For instance, it enables us to compare human QALYs to animal QALYs tailored to specific species. Hence, the intrinsic value of animal welfare impacts of policies can be monetized on the same scale as market and non-market impact for humans, facilitating benefit–cost analysis. Many challenges remain though, including issues of population ethics, political feasibility, and new complexities in addressing equity and uncertainty.

Measuring inequalities in a multidimensional framework is a challenging problem, which is common to most field of science and engineering. Nevertheless, despite the enormous amount of researches illustrating the fields of application of inequality indices, and of the Gini index in particular, very few consider the case of a multidimensional variable. In this paper, we consider in some details a new inequality index, based on the Fourier transform, that can be fruitfully applied to measure the degree of inhomogeneity of multivariate probability distributions. This index exhibits a number of interesting properties that make it very promising in quantifying the degree of inequality in datasets of complex and multifaceted social phenomena.

Recently several authors have proposed proxies of welfare that equate some (as opposed to all) choices with welfare. In this paper, I first distinguish between two prominent proxies: one based on context-independent choices and the other based on reason-based choices. I then propose an original proxy based on choices that individuals state they would want themselves to repeat at the time of the welfare/policy evaluation (confirmed choices). I articulate three complementary arguments that, I claim, support confirmed choices as a more reliable proxy of welfare than context-independent and reason-based choices. Finally, I discuss the implications of these arguments for nudges and boosts.

Most cost-benefit analyses assume that the estimates of costs and benefits are more or less accurate and unbiased. But what if, in reality, estimates are highly inaccurate and biased? Then the assumption that cost-benefit analysis is a rational way to improve resource allocation would be a fallacy. Based on the largest dataset of its kind, we test the assumption that cost and benefit estimates of public investments are accurate and unbiased. We find this is not the case with overwhelming statistical significance. We document the extent of cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and forecasting bias in public investments. We further assess whether such inaccuracies seriously distort effective resource allocation, which is found to be the case. We explain our findings in behavioral terms and explore their policy implications. Finally, we conclude that cost-benefit analysis of public investments stands in need of reform and we outline four steps to such reform.

This paper provides a Consent Justification for benefit–cost analysis (BCA). The Consent Justification is based on a tendency toward actual compensation. A substantial justification for using BCA as a tool is the actual Pareto test, called the Consent Justification, in combination with the net present value criterion for individual projects. The traditional justification, the potential compensation test (PCT), is unsatisfactory on several grounds. In addition, the PCT occupies the uneasy position of being the source of extended criticisms in the economic literature and especially in the legal and philosophy literature. The argument for the Consent Justification lies not only in the deficiencies of the PCT, but also, especially, in a showing through simulation that all tend to gain across a portfolio of projects which is not large but rather robust with respect to errors and assumptions.

We present a game-theoretical model arguing that greater public transparency does not necessarily lead to higher social welfare. Political agents can benefit from providing citizens with misleading information aimed at aligning citizens’ choices with the political agents’ preferences. Citizens can lose from being fooled by political agents, though they can mitigate their losses by conducting costly inspections to detect false information. Producing and detecting false information is costly and can reduce social welfare.

Using the coefficient of variations for heights, this paper examines the evolution of net nutrition inequality in Argentina from 1875 to 1950. It uses various samples of recruits and soldiers, previously gathered by the author. Evidence points to two important findings: (a) export-led growth led to stable or declining net-nutrition inequality; while import-substituting industrialisation generated significant net nutrition inequality; and (b) the highest levels of inequality in net nutrition took place during this latter phase in large urban, industrialised areas.

Practitioners of benefit-cost analysis face many difficulties. Despite the best training, guidance, and intentions, practitioners can stumble: actual benefit-cost analysis is hard and mistakes get made. Over the years, I have collected the mistakes I have seen in actual benefit-cost analyses. Many of the same mistakes occur over and over: the pitfalls of practical benefit-cost analysis. In this paper, I describe common pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them.

In this paper, we analyse the difference between two types of behavioural policies – nudges and boosts. We distinguish them on the basis of the mechanisms through which they are expected to operate and identify the contextual conditions that are necessary for each policy to be successful. Our framework helps judging which type of policy is more likely to bring about the intended behavioural outcome in a given situation.

Investment decision rules in risk situations have been extensively analyzed for firms. Most research focus on financial options and the wide range of methods based on dynamic programming currently used by firms to decide on whether and when to implement an irreversible investment under uncertainty. The situation is quite different for public investments, which are decided and largely funded by public authorities. These investments are assessed by public authorities, not through market criteria, but through public Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) procedures. Strangely enough, these procedures pay little attention to risk and uncertainty. The present text aims at filling this gap. We address the classic problem of whether and when an investment should be implemented. This stopping time problem is established in a framework where the discount rate is typically linked to GDP, which follows a Brownian motion, and where the benefits and cost of implementation follow linked Brownian motions. We find that the decision rule depends on a threshold value of the First Year Advantage/Cost ratio. This threshold can be expressed in a closed form including the means, standard deviations and correlations of the stochastic variables. Simulations with sensible current values of these parameters show that the systemic risk, coming from the correlation between the benefits of the investment and economic growth, is not that high, and that more attention should be paid to risks relating to the construction cost of the investment; furthermore, simple rules of thumb are designed for estimating the above-mentioned threshold. Some extensions are explored. Others are suggested for further research.

Behavioral economics and happiness research have many important implications for the conduct of benefit-cost analysis as well as for policy design and implementation. By identifying ways in which we may act irrationally and providing new perspectives on the relationship between our circumstances and our sense of well-being, this research raises numerous questions regarding the evaluation of individual and societal welfare and the desirability of alternative policies. In this special issue, we present a series of articles that explore these concerns and provide significant new insights.

Behavioral economists have identified certain biases in decision making that lead people to make decisions that harm themselves, but there is insufficient guidance for estimating benefits in the presence of such behavioral failures. This gap in principles and standards for benefit-cost analysis has led government agencies at times to adopt arbitrary and excessive benefit valuations. This article describes an approach to incorporating behavioral market failures into benefit estimation, first by advocating a behavioral transfer test to use before applying behavioral findings from narrow contexts to broader populations subject to regulation, and then by comparing the outcomes from the self-harming behavior to a policy reference point in which people are assumed to be fully informed and to act fully rationally in their own self-interest. This approach, which is grounded on systematic, well-documented, and context-specific findings of behavioral failings, would reduce instances of agencies assuming that behavioral findings in some contexts provide sufficient rationale for overriding consumer preferences in other contexts. It would also establish a consistent approach to government policy by, for example, creating symmetry between advancing policies that seek to discourage consumption of products for which consumers underestimate the health risks and fostering accurate risk beliefs to address erroneous individual choices based on risk overestimation.

If policymakers could measure the actual welfare effects of regulations, and if they had a properly capacious sense of welfare, they would not need to resort to cost-benefit analysis, which gives undue weight to some values and insufficient weight to others. Surveys of self-reported well-being provide valuable information, but it is not yet possible to “map” regulatory consequences onto well-being scales. It follows that at the present time, self-reported well-being cannot be used to assess the welfare effects of regulations. Nonetheless, greatly improved understandings are inevitable, and current findings with respect to reported well-being – above all the serious adverse effects of unemployment – deserve to play a role in regulatory policymaking.

Questions have been raised regarding the economic costs of a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in the United States. This analysis examines how welfare changes are measured and argues that they must be decomposed by groups. Producers with animals quarantined and slaughtered because of FMD measure their welfare change using lost sales. Producers not quarantined measure their welfare change using producer surplus. The change in national sales revenue is accurate when the supply elasticity is low. Welfare changes for consumers also must be decomposed because the change in aggregate consumer surplus hides important shifts in welfare among groups of consumers.

Treatment of time in travel cost models has been a source of contention among economists. The debate persists because welfare estimates, which are the principal objectives of these studies, are highly sensitive to the treatment of time. The present study examines the dual role of on-site time using evidence from two wilderness areas in Alabama. The empirical results comply with the theoretical expectation that on-site time is both a source of utility and cost. The exclusion of on-site time from demand functions results in biased parameter estimates. In particular, it yields smaller own-price coefficients and higher welfare estimates.

Small research firms developing biotechnology applications often focus on establishing intellectual property rights (IPRs), which can then be sold to more established firms with existing market channels. This paper presents a method for valuing the IPRs for an innovation that lowers product production costs below those associated with the patented process of a monopolist. The application to Glucocerebrosidase enzyme from transgenic tobacco suggests an IPRs value of about $1.75 billion. Despite the innovator's market power, significant surplus gains also accrue to consumers. Further, U.S. antitrust laws that prohibit IPRs acquisition by the current monopolist increase consumer welfare by almost 50%.

We develop a theoretical model where child labour results from a household's trade-off between sending a child to school or to work. Education is considered as a risky investment, since the survival of the child is not certain. We explore the effects of public expenditure on education and health on child labour, specifying a transmission mechanism for each kind of spending. On the one hand, we establish that health expenditure reduces child labour all the more as child mortality rate is high. On the other hand, a moderate aversion to risk is a necessary condition for education expenditure to reduce child labour. Our theoretical results are empirically validated on panel data from 66 developing countries between 1985 and 2000.

Cet article analyse les politiques fiscales à mettre en œuvre afin de lutter contre une externalité de pollution. Nous considérons un modèle à générations imbriquées où seul l'État mène une activité de maintenance de l'environnement, financée par le prélèvement de taxes. L'équilibre concur-rentiel est sous-optimal puisque l'économie est confrontée (i) à un problème de fourniture du bien public qu'est la maintenance, (ii) à une externalité de pollution induite par la consommation, (iii) à l'égoïsme des individus à courte durée de vie. Nous déterminons la structure fiscale telle que l'optimum et l'équilibre concurrentiel coïncident. Nous retrouvons alors la règle de Samuelson, modifiée afin d'intégrer un taux d'actualisation social pertinent, incorporant le taux d'assimilation naturelle de la pollution. Par ailleurs, l'intervention publique ne peut se limiter à neutraliser les flux de polluants : cette activité publique doit prendre en compte, outre une composante de dépollution, une composante optimale d'entretien.