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Benefit-Cost Analysis And Distributional Weights: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler
Benefit-Cost Analysis And Distributional Weights: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is insensitive to distributional concerns. A policy that improves the lives of the rich, and makes the poor yet worse off, will be approved by CBA as long as the policy’s aggregate monetized benefits are positive. Distributional weights offer an apparent solution to this troubling feature of the CBA methodology: adjust costs and benefits with weighting factors that are inversely proportional to the well-being levels (as determined by income and also perhaps non-income attributes such as health) of the affected individuals.
Indeed, an academic literature dating from the 1950s discusses how to specify distributional weights. And …
Consumption, Risk And Prioritarianism, Matthew D. Adler, Nicolas Treich
Consumption, Risk And Prioritarianism, Matthew D. Adler, Nicolas Treich
Faculty Scholarship
In this paper, we study consumption decisions under risk assuming a prioritarian social welfare function, namely a concave transformation of individual utility functions. Under standard assumptions, there is always more current consumption under ex ante prioritarianism than under utilitarianism. Thus, a concern for equity (in the ex ante prioritarian sense) means less concern for the risky future. In contrast, there is usually less current consumption under ex post prioritarianism than under utilitarianism. We discuss the robustness of these results to learning, and to other forms of prioritarian social welfare functions.
Beyond Efficiency And Procedure: A Welfarist Theory Of Regulation, Matthew D. Adler
Beyond Efficiency And Procedure: A Welfarist Theory Of Regulation, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
Normative scholarship about regulation has been dominated by two types of theories, which I term "Neoclassical" and "Proceduralist." A Neoclassical theory has the following features: it adopts a simple preference-based view of well-being, and it counts Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as one of the basic normative criteria relevant to the evaluation of regulatory programs. A Proceduralist theory is concerned, not solely with the quality of regulatory outcomes, but also with the governmental procedures that produce these outcomes: it gives intrinsic significance to the procedures that regulatory bodies follow. (One example of a Proceduralist theory is the civic republican theory of regulation advanced …