Government Borrowing and Crowding Out

We investigate the impact of fiscal expansions on firm investment by exploiting firms that have multiple banking relationships. Further, we conduct a localized RDD approach and compare the lending behavior of banks that barely met and missed the criteria of being a primary dealer, as well as barely winners and losers at government auctions. Our results indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in banks’ bonds-to-assets ratio decreases loans by up to 0.4%, which leads to significant declines in firm investment, profits and wages. Our findings are grounded in a quantitative model with financial and real sectors with which we undertake a welfare analysis and compute the cost of government borrowing on the overall economy.

Social-Costs Perspective Impacts of Cybercrime in World-Economy, Country-Wise: Policy-Guidance under Piecemeal Approach

Today’s technology-driven human-society(s) country-wise are counted more than ever before where UAE-society is no exception. Tech-users here compete for comparative time-saving options for marginalizing operating costs. It has resulted in huge data usages, a high number of users & devices, which has attracted criminals for taking advantage, which is called cybercrime. Addressing cybercrime, the UAE, like many countries, is not out of control by-laws. However, laws like cybercrime for its society are not always for absolutely eliminating the crime. Thus, besides cybercrime law in place, UAE needs a piecemeal approach in practice where one department may vary from approaches of other-department. With awareness about risky online behaviors & options, tech-users as defenders are needed to invest their efforts. This study has laid out the foundation of the proposal, Akim’s Model-2021, using the Theory of Consumer Choice & Behaviors and Welfare Analysis. Tech-user’s actual utility-received is the sum of utility-received from awareness & own-effort and utility-received from cybercrime-law. Any changes to services received from joint efforts may risk tech-user, to be a victim. Welfare analysis shows tech user's actions - awareness & own-effort, besides cybercrime-law can create, Net Social-gain, which largely depends on tech user's actions. Tech-user’s economic surplus is greater than government expenses for implementation of cybercrime law in UAE. Net-loss to the UAE is the sum of deadweight loss and net-loss to tech producers for underutilized resources.

Scale Norming Undermines the Use of Life Satisfaction Scale Data for Welfare Analysis

Scale norming is where respondents use qualitatively different scales to answer the same question across survey waves. It makes responses challenging to compare intertemporally or interpersonally. This paper develops a formal model of the cognitive process that could give rise to scale norming in year on year responses to life satisfaction scale questions. It then uses this model to conceptually differentiate scale norming from adaptation and changes in reference points. Scale norming could make life satisfaction responses misleading with regards to the changing welfare of individuals. In particular, individuals who would say that their life is "improving" or "going well" might nonetheless give the same scale response year after year. This has negative implications for the use of scales in cost–benefit analysis and other welfarist applications. While there is already substantial empirical evidence for the existence of scale norming, its implications for welfare analysis are sometimes understated on the grounds that this evidence might simply be the product of errors of memory. The paper presents new empirical evidence for scale norming from two surveys (N1 = 278; N2 = 1050) designed such that errors of memory are an unconvincing explanation for the results.

Asymmetric Demand Response When Prices Increase and Decrease: The Case of Child Healthcare

This study tests whether demand responds symmetrically to price increases and decreases—a seemingly obvious proposition under conventional demand theory that has not been rigorously tested. Exploiting the rapid expansion in Japanese municipal subsidies for child healthcare in a difference-in-differences framework, we find evidence against conventional demand theory: when coinsurance, our price measure, increases from 0% to 30%, the demand response is more than twice that to a price decrease from 30% to 0%. This result indicates that while economists and policymakers pay little attention, price change direction matters and should be incorporated into welfare analysis.

Responsibility utility and the difference between preference and desirance: implications for welfare evaluation

Actions can provide “responsibility utility” when they signal the actors’ identities or values to others or to themselves. This paper considers a novel implication of this responsibility utility for welfare analysis: fully informed incentive-compatible choice data can give a biased measure of the utility delivered by exogenously determined outcomes. A person’s choice of a policy outcome may be informed by responsibility utility that would be strictly absent if that same person were a passive recipient of that same policy outcome. We introduce the term “desirance” to describe a rank ordering over exogenously determined outcomes and present evidence that desirance captures the welfare consequences of exogenously determined outcomes more accurately than preference. We review literatures showing that preference is sensitive to contextual variations that influence responsibility utility and show experimentally that responsibility utility can explain discrepancies between welfare estimates derived from choice data and subjective well-being data. We close by discussing subjective well-being as a potential measure of desirance.