Download or read book Essays on Public Policy and Consumer Choice written by Melissa Schettini Kearney and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Cont.) An empirical test of the expected utility hypothesis finds that, in general, it is a reasonable description of observed consumer choices. However, the data offer some evidence in support of non-linear probability weighting in consumer preferences. The second application studied in this thesis is welfare reform. A number of states have recently instituted family cap policies, under which women who conceive a child while receiving cash assistance are not entitled to additional cash benefits. Chapter three investigates how fertility behavior responds to this change in government expenditure policy. The analysis takes advantage of the variation across states in the timing of family cap implementation to determine if these policies are discouraging women from having additional births. The data consistently demonstrate that the family cap does not lead to a reduction in births. This finding of no effect is robust to the incorporation of lead and lag effects, to considering separately total and higher-order births, and to limiting the sample to demographic groups with high welfare propensities.

Download or read book Essays on Consumer Choice and Public Policy written by Jukwan Lee and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters on consumer choice and public policy. The first chapter re-evaluates the realized efficacy of increasing block pricing (IBP). IBP is expected to give a positive social benefit, this assumes that consumers are attentive to the marginal price, which is questioned by recent literature. This paper measures the welfare loss from inattentiveness to the marginal price, which is defined as the misperception effect. By comparing IBP's efficacy and the misperception effect, the net benefit of using an IBP schedule is revealed. This study starts by identifying consumers' perceived marginal price. Using this perceived price, the demand curve can be estimated. After that, each consumer's and firm's surplus change are calculated. The second chapter studies the impact of snowfall on airport operation and suggests a comprehensive benefit and cost analysis on airport investment. Using two advanced econometric method, the Triple Difference model and the Nearest Neighbor Matching, this study first develops a Delay Analysis model to evaluate the exact effect of snowfall delay and secondly conducts the Net Present Value analysis on the Heated Pavement System (HPS). Delays by snows estimated up to about 9 minutes for airports in the Boston area, and HPS is feasible for airports with a great number of flights and passengers, such as Boston Logan airport.The third chapter explores the expected result of investment in runway, which could, in turn, reduce snow-related delays and cancellations. Three airports in the Boston area are selected since the geographical proximity would lead to intense competition once they are privatized. Each airport's arrival and departure itinerary data is used for assessment and identification of cost and benefit conditions to achieve this investment. For the analysis, this study constructs a two-stage game model of airports and airlines and follows the subgame perfect equilibrium. Backward induction and simulation for the different scenario are used for analysis. The equilibrium conditions show that private competition between profit maximization airports can stimulate large investment in a heated runway.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Quality and Availability written by Saman Olfati and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Why Government Is the Problem written by Milton Friedman and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedman discusses a government system that is no longer controlled by "we, the people." Instead of Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," we now have a government "of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats," including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats.

Download or read book Essays in Consumer Choice written by Salar Jahedi and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumer Choice written by Christopher T. Erb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The United States health care system is unique among those of other developed economies--most significantly because health care is not a legal right in the United States. Instead, it is considered an employee benefit and a privilege, unless one is over age 65 or of low income. The United States is the only developed country without some form of universal health care.Contributors to this volume represent an interdisciplinary group of academics, practitioners, and service delivery providers. The volume begins with a general examination of the politics of health and social welfare in the United States. It then focuses on the importance and role of consumers in the U.S. economy, and dilemmas associated with promoting consumer choice. It explores policy issues and challenges in three specific areas: controlling health care costs and protecting choice with respect to health care, the major challenges to informed choice in health care, and barriers to effective health care service delivery. Contributors explore changes and reforms that have been introduced within public and privately financed systems over the past ten years.Consumer Choice examines in a timely and efficient manner critical social and health policy issues--nationally and internationally--and the major challenges that face informed choice in health care and social policy. Policymakers, health care officials, and medical personnel in the United States and other countries will find this volume highly informative."

Download or read book Essays on Consumer Choice written by Pavitra Jindahra and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Policy and Regulation in Agricultural and Food Markets written by Shuay-Tsyr Ho and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation analyzes the empirical implications of selected policies and regulations applied to agricultural and food markets in the United States. It focuses on the policies at the regional level where the role of government influences the dynamics of agricultural markets and consumer behavior. In the first essay, in Chapter 2, I examine how regulation affects household diversity-seeking behavior for alcohol. Here I hypothesize that different state-level regulatory regimes in alcohol retail sales impact shopping convenience. I use a consumer panel dataset to examine household purchases of alcohol between 2004 and 2016. By focusing on a subset of households that moved between regulatory regimes in the pooled cross-sectional dataset, I am able to treat the time-invariant regulatory rules as a natural experiment to identify the causal impact of grocery store sales of alcohol on consumer choice diversification. The key finding suggests consumers further diversify their product selections in states that allow alcohol sales in grocery stores which reduces consumer's shopping costs and increases convenience. In the second essay, in Chapter 3, I focus on the effects of crop insurance on the supply of specialty crops in the United States. I use a nationally-representative farm-level dataset to evaluate the impacts of crop insurance on the acreage and crop value of fruits and vegetables. The empirical strategy addresses the potential endogeneity between the provision of crop insurance and the economic significance of the crops. In assessing how the availability of crop insurance affects supply, I use a number of variables to instrument insurance availability for fruits and vegetables. Instruments include i) the number of policies sold and premium subsidies for field crops within the same county, ii) the number of policies sold and premium subsidies for fruits and vegetable crops in the neighboring counties, which characterize various degrees of insurance demand. The two-stage findings suggest that crop insurance has increased both the harvested acreage and production value of fruits and vegetables. In the final essay, presented in Chapter 4, I worked with a team to evaluate several risk management strategies for cherry growers facing crop losses due to spring frost and excessive summer rain. Here we developed a framework to model stochastic prices, yields, and revenue for sweet cherries in New York and Michigan in a Monte Carlo simulation framework. This research constructed a novel dataset comprised of state-level market information for sweet cherries, station-level weather data, and the monitored performance of high tunnel at horticultural trials from research farms. Our results show that when there are significant price premiums for early season fruit, a high tunnel system could be the optimal strategy as it has the capacity to generate higher net profits compared to a variety of alternative strategies using insurance products.

Download or read book The Moral Dimensions of Public Policy Choice written by John Martin Gillroy and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 1992-08-15 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining philosophy with practical politics, an expanding area of policy studies applies moral precepts, critical principles, and conventional values to collective decisions. This evolving new approach to policy analysis asserts that the same variety of ethical principles available to the individual are also available to make collective decisions in the public interest and should be used.Although policy analysis has long been dominated by assumptions originally developed for the examination of markets, such as efficiency, these essays by leading scholars - the best work done in the field over the past three decades - explore alternatives to the "market paradigm" and show how moral discrimination and choice can extend beyond the individual to encompass public decisions.Chapters by John Martin Gillroy and Maurice Wade review the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume as backgrounds for the development of modern concepts of public policy choice. They present this anthology as a first step in codifying options, arguments, and methods within this important developing area of policy studies.

Download or read book Consumer Choice Imperfect Information and Public Policy written by Victor P. Goldberg and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Triumph of the Market written by Edward Herman and published by . This book was released on 1997-02-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **** The third edition (1990) is cited in Brandon-Hill. A text that focuses on the decision-making process which precedes and governs the selection of treatment of various pediatric orthopedic conditions. Each author provides the basic science that relates to the condition under discussion and the scientific basis for treatment decisions. This revised and updated edition is also completely reorganized, adding a second editor and 16 new authors. New chapters deal with orthopedic genetics, history taking and examination of the pediatric patient, syndromes and localized disorders affecting bone, neuromuscular disorders, and fracture treatment, a major portion of pediatric orthopedic practice. Thoroughly illustrated in bandw. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Essays in Modeling Individual Preferences written by Armenak Markosyan and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Austro Libertarian Point of View written by Alan G. Futerman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers several areas of economic theory and political philosophy from the perspective of Austrian Economics and libertarianism. As such, it deals with Epistemology and Methodology, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Labor Economics, International Economics, Political Philosophy, Law and Public Policy, all from the Austro-libertarian perspective. Hence, this book offers an integrated view of libertarianism and Austrian economics in the light of recent debates in the areas of economic science and political philosophy. Moreover, it builds from the foundations of the Austrian approach (epistemology and methodology), while the latter material deals with its application to the individual from the microeconomic perspective, which in turn allows an exploration of subjects in macroeconomics. Additionally, this work applies Austro-libertarianism to law, politics, and public policy. Thus, it offers a unified view of the entire approach, in a logical progression, allowing the readers to judge this perspective in full. Futerman and Block say that their book is not a manual, which I suppose it is not. But it is a collection of highly pertinent essays, from which you can understand what is mistaken in the orthodoxy of economics, law, and politics. The central term of art in Austrian economics is that phrase “human action.” It is the exercise of human will, not the blind bumping of one molecule against another or one organism against another, as in the physical sciences... Futerman and Block distinguish Austrian economics as a scientific enterprise based on liberty of the will from “libertarianism” as an advocacy based on policies implied by such liberty. “Although Austrian economics is positive and libertarianism is normative,” they write, “this book shows how both are related; how each can support the other.” Indeed they do. Deirdre N. McCloskey, PhD UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics and of History Emerita, Professor of English Emerita, Professor of Communication Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago

Download or read book Essays on the Equilibrium Effects of Public Policies written by Hernan Felipe Barahona Kunze and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation combines three essays on the equilibrium effects of public policies. In it, we study the (unintended) consequences that arise from large-scale policy implementations due to equilibrium responses. We combine reduced-form evidence that exploits quasi-experimental variation induced by policy interventions with structural models that help to connect the data to a theoretical framework. The first chapter studies a national food labeling policy implemented in Chile. The second chapter looks at vintage-specific driving restrictions that impose limits on car use for older vehicles implemented in Chile. The third chapter estimates the gains and benefits of a large-scale affirmative action program implemented in Brazil. In Chapter 1, "Equilibrium Effects of Food Labeling Policies, " joint with Cristobal Otero, Sebastian Otero, and Joshua Kim, we study the effects of a front-of-package labeling regulation implemented in Chile that mandates the use of warning labels on products whose sugar or calorie concentration exceeds certain thresholds. We combine reduced-form analysis with a structural model of supply and demand for food and nutrients to quantify the impact of the policy on nutritional intake and consumer welfare. In the first part of the paper, we document an overall decrease in sugar and calorie intake of 9% and 7% after the implementation of the policy. On the demand-side, we show that consumers substitute from labeled to unlabeled products. This effect is mostly driven by products which consumers mistakenly believed to be healthy before the policy. On the supply-side, we find substantial reformulation of products and bunching at the regulatory thresholds. We then develop and estimate a model. In our model, consumers care about the price, taste, and healthiness of food products, but may have poorly calibrated beliefs about products' nutritional content. Food labels help consumers to make better-informed purchasing decisions by providing information. Firms choose products' prices and nutritional content to maximize profits. Food labels induce firms to reformulate their products to avoid receiving a label. However, reducing the concentration of critical nutrients is costly, and may cause firms to raise prices that get passed on to consumers. We find that food labels increase consumer surplus by 3.8\% of total expenditure. We also show that firms' responses enhance the effects of food labels on nutritional intake by 142\% and increase gains in consumer surplus by 18\%. We then use the model to study alternative policy designs. Under optimal policy thresholds, food labels cause gains in average consumer surplus similar to those of optimal sugar taxes but benefit the poor relatively more. In Chapter 2 "Vintage-specific Driving Restriction, " joint with Francisco Gallego and Juan-Pablo Montero, and published in the Review of Economic Studies in July 2020, we study the effects of vintage-specific driving restrictions on pollution and consumer welfare. Authorities in many cities around the world have imposed limits on car use through driving restrictions, that ban the use of cars one day a week according to the last digit of the license plate. By placing uniform restrictions on all cars, many of these programs have created incentives for drivers to buy additional, more polluting cars. We study vintage-specific restrictions, which place heavy limits on older, polluting vehicles and no limits on newer, cleaner ones. We use a novel model of the car market and data from Santiago's 1992 program, the earliest program to use vintage-specific restrictions, and show that such restrictions should be designed to work exclusively through the extensive margin (the type of car driven), never through the intensive margin (number of miles driven). If so, vintage restrictions can yield important welfare gains by moving the fleet composition toward cleaner cars, comparing well to alternative instruments such as scrappage subsidies and pollution-based registration fees. In Chapter 3 "Affirmative Action in Centralized College Admission Systems, " joint with Sebastian Otero and Caue Dobbin, we study the distributional consequences of affirmative action in selective college education in the context of a centralized admission system. We examine the effects of a law passed in Brazil in 2012, mandating all federal public universities to increase the number of seats reserved for public high-school students to half of the total. We find that after the policy was put in place, the student body composition of public institutions became more similar to that of the applicant pool. We show that the proportion of admits to public institutions from private high schools dropped from 55% in 2011 to 35% in 2016. This is closer to the 20% share of overall high-school graduates that private school graduates represent. To study the overall distributional consequences of the policy, we leverage the rules from the centralized admission system and simulate a counterfactual allocation of spots in a regime without affirmative action. Our research design exploits admission cutoffs for heavily over-subscribed degrees to estimate the policy effects on the marginally benefited and marginally displaced student. We find that benefited individuals gain around 50% in expected future earnings, while displaced lose only 5%.

Download or read book Public Philosophy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.

Download or read book Three Essays on Firm Strategy and Public Policy written by Byung-Cheol Kim and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Issues in Economic Theory and Public Policy written by Amitava Bose and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Festschrift honoring Tapas Majumdar, professor of economics; comprises contributed articles, in the Indian context.