1 Introduction and Overview -- 2 Political Competition Among Interest Groups -- 3 Bootleggers and Baptists in the Market for Regulation -- 4 Partial Regulation of Natural Monopoly -- 5 The Political Economy of Risk Communication Policies for Food and Alcoholic Beverages -- 6 Economic Prescriptions for Environmental Problems: Not Exactly What the Doctor Ordered -- 7 Disclosure, Consent, and Environmental Risk Regulation.
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Children can face disproportionately greater risk from environmental hazards because they are kids—smaller bodies, faster metabolisms, shorter attentions spans, less knowledge, and fewer resources. Environmental programs that reduce risks to children produce benefits to society that should be adequately represented so policy makers have more information to help them decide which policies are most worthwhile relative to their costs. The open question is just how exactly to value these reductions in risks to children, risks which can arise either from a direct effect on their health, or an indirect effect on their life chances because of illness in other family members or the degradation of the environment. This article focuses on valuing these indirect effects to a child's life chances. The question addressed here is whether standard benefits estimation adequately captures the indirect effects on healthy children. If policy makers presume caregivers make fully informed, rational choices when dealing with adverse family health, indirect effects are already accounted for in revealed and stated values: estimating indirect effects implies double counting of benefits. But if policy makers fear that caregivers face choice without complete information or experience, indirect effects might be understated. Then it becomes constructive to devote resources to explore the importance of these indirect effects.
Levin et al. deliver a sweeping lecture on the state of nature and society. They point out that economic and ecological systems are linked, this linkage is complex, and that in the litany of environmental disasters that awaits us 'none can be treated by traditional markets, or regulatory policies.' Markets fail because they do not aggregate information accurately; corrective policies fail too because lobbying efforts serve to polarize rather than galvanize public debate. Policymakers, social planners, and researchers are asked to rethink their typical conduct, and instead focus on the construction of flexible and adaptive institutions that can accommodate the uncertain future in a way that maintains human welfare. Trust and intellectual guidance are the ties that bind a better world to these undefined, but resilient new institutions.
In our opinion, the challenges of ongoing measurement, the ever-moving behavioral baseline, and strategic self-ignorance return us full-circle to a sensible point made by Peter Bohm–Benefit-Cost Analysis for environmental goods should use an interval method.
AbstractRecent work with Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in development economics has contributed to economists' use of the experimental mindset to inform policy choices. Development scholars, however, question the authority of RCT evidence, and worry that the RCT trend will turn their profession away from theory and econometrics. We examine this challenge, as well as RCTs' role within the broader experimental area, with a thorough review of relevant literature. We find that generic RCT fears are overstated. Experimental methods should be evaluated as a tool to test theory, search for patterns, and to pre‐test new institutions. From this mindset, we see unexplored pathways that may benefit from the experimental mindset, further economic theory, and reduce poverty.
Abstract We show that the second‐best case against the optimality of free trade remains valid in the face of a well‐targeted, but costly, policy response. Trade between a North, where property rights can be enforced at relatively low cost, and an otherwise identical South, yields trade patterns and welfare results nearly identical to those previously shown to arise if North and South differ exogenously in the extent of control over resources. Both nations respond optimally to world prices, and the opening of trade leads to the development of property rights in the South. Nonetheless, for a set of world prices bounded by the South's autarky price, the South is better off under autarky and is made worse off by each increase in its export price.
