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Full-Text Articles in Business
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 …
Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, And The Competence-Control Trade-Off, Charles M. Cameron, John De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis
Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, And The Competence-Control Trade-Off, Charles M. Cameron, John De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis
Faculty Scholarship
We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort "slackers" from "zealots." Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has …