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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Fair Innings? The Utilitarian And Prioritarian Value Of Risk Reduction Over A Whole Lifetime, Matthew D. Adler, Maddalena Ferranna, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich
Fair Innings? The Utilitarian And Prioritarian Value Of Risk Reduction Over A Whole Lifetime, Matthew D. Adler, Maddalena Ferranna, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich
Faculty Scholarship
The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual’s fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a “prioritarian” SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility.
We show that the prioritarian SVRR provides a rigorous basis in economic theory for the “fair innings” concept, proposed in the public health literature: as between an older individual …
Priority For The Worse Off And The Social Cost Of Carbon, Matthew D. Adler, David Anthoff, Valentina Bosetti, Greg Garner, Klaus Keller, Nicolas Treich
Priority For The Worse Off And The Social Cost Of Carbon, Matthew D. Adler, David Anthoff, Valentina Bosetti, Greg Garner, Klaus Keller, Nicolas Treich
Faculty Scholarship
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. …
Does Falling Smoking Lead To Rising Obesity?, Jonathan Gruber, Michael D. Frakes
Does Falling Smoking Lead To Rising Obesity?, Jonathan Gruber, Michael D. Frakes
Faculty Scholarship
The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S.. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. (2004), who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet …