The design of new hospital inpatient rooms is moving towards private (single occupancy) rooms. These rooms are generally preferred by patients and they may improve patient care, but they are more expensive to build and to staff than semi-private rooms. The question of their societal worth is important because hospitals are expensive, long-term investments and, once built, are prohibitively expensive to change. This paper presents a benefit-cost analysis of private rooms versus semi-private rooms in a proposed new hospital. We estimate that the net social benefit of a bed in a private room is about $70,000 more than a bed in a semi-private room.

This article reviews the rationale for and various approaches used by economists to incorporate distributional consequences of projects or policies into benefit-cost analyses. Approaches reviewed include distributional weights and metrics based on the Lorenz curve. Analysis of distributional issues in partial equilibrium and general equilibrium settings are briefly reviewed. We present an empirical demonstration of how the contingent valuation method (CVM) and hedonic property methods (HPM) can be used to quantify how non-market environmental benefits are distributed by income and ethnicity. Using CVM, the distribution of non-market benefits can be cross-tabbed with respondent demographics, so that a variety of “distributions” of benefits by relevant demographic groups can be calculated. Using the HPM, the analyst can statistically test to see if the implicit price gradient varies with differences in income and ethnicity. In our empirical example, we find that ethnicity and income interaction terms on the implicit price gradient are statistically significant suggesting differential effects of National Forest fire suppression policies on Hispanics and low income households.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) retain a strong presence in many economies around the world. How do governments manage these firms given their dual economic and political nature? Many states use authority over executive appointments as a key means of governing SOEs. We analyze the nature of this “personnel power” by assessing patterns in SOE leaders’ political mobility in China, the country with the largest state-owned sector. Using logit and multinomial models on an original dataset of central SOE leaders’ attributes and company information from 2003 to 2017, we measure the effects of economic performance and political connectedness on leaders’ likelihood of staying in power. We find that leaders of well-performing firms and those with patronage ties to elites in charge of their evaluation are more likely to stay in office. These findings suggest that states can leverage personnel power in pursuit of economic and political stability when SOE management is highly politically integrated.

The federal Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), as amended in 1996, enables benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to be used in setting federal drinking water standards, known as MCLs. While BCAs are typically conceived of as a tool to inform efficiency considerations by helping to identify MCL options that maximize net social benefits, in this paper we also illustrate how important equity and affordability considerations can be brought to light by suitably applying BCAs to drinking water regulations, especially in the context of communities served by relatively small water systems. We examine the applicability and relevance of health-health analysis (HHA), and provide an empirical evaluation of the risk tradeoffs that may be associated with the MCL established for arsenic. We find that the cost-associated risks may offset a nontrivial portion of the cancer risk reduction benefits attributed to the MCL (e.g., the additional adverse health impacts from the costs may be roughly half as large as the number of cancer cases avoided). This reveals the relevance of using the HHA approach for examining net benefits of MCLs in small drinking water utilities, and raises issues related to whether and how these cost-associated health risks should be considered in BCAs for drinking water standards.

The income elasticity of the value per statistical life (VSL) is an important parameter for policy analysis. Mortality risk reductions often dominate the quantified benefits of environmental and other policies, and estimates of their value are frequently transferred across countries with significantly different income levels. U.S. regulatory agencies typically assume that a 1.0 percent change in real income over time will lead to a 0.4 to 0.6 percent change in the VSL. While elasticities within this range are supported by substantial research, they appear nonsensical if applied to populations with significantly smaller incomes. When transferring values between high and lower income countries, analysts often instead assume an elasticity of 1.0, but the resulting VSL estimates appear large in comparison to income. Elasticities greater than 1.0 are supported by research on the relationship between long-term economic growth and the VSL, by cross-country comparisons, and by new research that estimates the VSL by income quantile. Caution is needed when applying these higher elasticities, however, because the resulting VSLs appear smaller than expected future earnings or consumption in some cases, contrary to theory. In addition to indicating the need for more research, this comparison suggests that, in the interim, VSL estimates should be bounded below by estimates of future income or consumption.

A standard framework for business ethics views the inquiry as an application of major ethical theories to specific issues in business. As these theories are largely presented as being principled, the exercise therefore becomes one of applying general principles to business situations. Many adopting this standard approach have thus resisted the implementation of the most prominent development in ethical theory in recent history: that of particularism. In this article, I argue that particularist thinking has much to offer to business ethics and that standard resistance to particularist business ethics is based largely on misunderstandings. I do so by illustrating how the harbinger of particularism, W. D. Ross, countenances the practical wisdom of particularist ethics while being 1) invulnerable to standard objections to particularist business ethics and 2) compatible with the generalism of the standard approach. The Rossian business ethic is therefore one that the standard approach should be eager to include.

This paper deals with public investment in High-Speed Rail (HSR) infrastructure and tries to understand the economic rationale for allocating public money to the construction of new HSR lines. The examination of data on costs and demand shows that the case for investing in HSR requires several conditions to be met: an ex ante high volume of traffic in the corridor where the new lines are built, significant time savings, high average willingness of potential users to pay, the release of capacity in the conventional rail network and airports. On the contrary, net environmental benefits seem to be insignificant in influencing the social desirability of HSR investment. This paper discusses, within a cost-benefit analysis framework, under which conditions the expected benefits could justify the investment in HSR projects.

In the competition between American states for economic development, about half of American states offer lower levels of labor rights in the form of “right-to-work” (RTW) laws. RTW states often tout their advantages in competing for foreign investment, but do foreign companies really want weaker labor regulation? Many foreign firms locate production in the United States not to lower labor costs but for other reasons, such as proximity to consumers or to employ highly skilled workers, implying that differences across labor regulations within rich countries may be declining in importance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between RTW laws and greenfield foreign direct investments. In particular, we explore recent RTW changes across two states, Indiana and Michigan, controlling for national trends in foreign investment. Adopting RTW increases foreign investment in manufacturing in both states, but Michigan's RTW law is associated with gains in service-sector projects even while Indiana's is not. While RTW may attract more manufacturing, it is not enough to generate broad-based gains across the economy.

Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gone “mainstream,” the relationship between CSR and corporate political activities (CPA) has received little scholarly attention. This is problematic because firms potentially have a more sizable impact through their lobbying activities for socially and environmentally beneficial (or unbeneficial) public policies than through their own operations. This paper investigates if, and how, UN Global Compact signatory firms differ in their policy preferences on key EU proposals compared to other interest groups. To capture state-of-the-art data on firms’ policy preferences, I draw from the INTEREURO database, which includes firms’ lobbying positions on forty-three directives and twenty-seven regulations covering 112 public policy issues in the European Union. Statistical results show that Global Compact signatory firms significantly lobby for stricter regulation than non-signatory firms and industry associations, however, their positions are still lower than nonbusiness groups. These results are similar across various public policy issues and suggest that the regulatory preferences of firms’ participating in soft law CSR initiatives are more aligned with stakeholders' interests. This paper contributes to public policy literature exploring the relationship between hard and soft law as well as literature studying the political representation of divergent interest.