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Full-Text Articles in Public Policy
Global Climate Policy Will Have Net Benefits Larger Than Anyone Thinks (And Welfare Gains, Strangely, Are Likely To Be Much Larger Yet), Philip E. Graves
Global Climate Policy Will Have Net Benefits Larger Than Anyone Thinks (And Welfare Gains, Strangely, Are Likely To Be Much Larger Yet), Philip E. Graves
PHILIP E GRAVES
As with other public goods lacking strong special interest support, global climate policy suffers from two serious theoretical flaws. The first is failure to endogenize the labor-leisure decision when conducting benefit-cost analysis. Recognition that income generated will not remain the same pre-and-post policy results in downward bias in benefit estimation. Much more importantly, there will generally be free riding in input markets in addition to the well-known output demand revelation problem. Since even households with very high marginal values cannot individually increment public goods, too little income will be generated and too much of the income that is generated will …
Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Enviromental Projects: A Plethora Of Biases Understating Net Benefits, Philip E. Graves
Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Enviromental Projects: A Plethora Of Biases Understating Net Benefits, Philip E. Graves
PHILIP E GRAVES
There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores sources of bias in the methods used to evaluate environmental policy in the United States, although most of the arguments translate immediately to decision-making in other countries. There are some “big picture” considerations that have gone unrecognized, and there are numerous more minor, yet cumulatively important, technical details that point to potentially large biases against acceptance on benefit-cost …