论文标题
用于成本效益分析的公理框架
An Axiomatic Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis
论文作者
论文摘要
近年来,公共基金的边际价值(MVPF)已成为进行成本效益分析的流行工具。 MVPF依赖于支付意愿与净财政成本的政策的比率。 MVPF为决策者提供了有关股票效率权衡的重要信息,而股票效率不一定是通过绝对福利措施传达的。但是,我在本文中表明,MVPF对比较福利分析的有用性有限,因为它遭受了几种经验上重要的经济悖论和统计不规则。在使用MVPF跨政策或人口亚组汇总福利方面,还有几个实际问题。为了解决这些问题,我开发了一个新的公理框架,以构建一种以更好的方式量化股票效率折衷的度量。我这样做的情况不妥协MVPF的核心特征:无单位属性以及其依据的主要优先顺序。我的公理框架提供了我称为相对策略值(RPV)的独特(ECONO)度量,可以加权以进行比较和绝对的福利分析(或其混合组合)以及直观地汇总福利(而无需基于MVPF的集合中的问题)。我还提出了计算方便的方法,以对福利措施进行统一有效的统计推断。在使用我的新计量经济学方法重新分析了几项政府政策之后,我得出的结论是,关于某些政策的福利存在实质性的经济和统计不确定性,这些政策以前据报道具有很高甚至“精确估计的无限” MVPF值。
In recent years, the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) has become a popular tool for conducting cost-benefit analysis; the MVPF relies on the ratio of willingness-to-pay for a policy divided by its net fiscal cost. The MVPF gives policymakers important information about the equity-efficiency trade-off that is not necessarily conveyed by absolute welfare measures. However, I show in this paper that the usefulness of MVPF for comparative welfare analysis is limited, because it suffers from several empirically important economic paradoxes and statistical irregularities. There are also several practical issues in using the MVPF to aggregate welfare across policies or across population subgroups. To address these problems, I develop a new axiomatic framework to construct a measure that quantifies the equity-efficiency trade-off in a better way. I do so without compromising on the core features of the MVPF: its unit-free property, and the main preference orderings underlying it. My axiomatic framework delivers a unique (econo)metric that I call the Relative Policy Value (RPV), which can be weighted to conduct both comparative and absolute welfare analyses (or a hybrid combination thereof) and to intuitively aggregate welfare (without encountering the issues in MVPF-based aggregation). I also propose computationally convenient methods to make uniformly valid statistical inferences on welfare measures. After reanalyzing several government policies using my new econometric methods, I conclude that there is substantial economic and statistical uncertainty about welfare of some policies that were previously reported to have very high or even "precisely estimated infinite" MVPF values.