Public Policy

Welfare states, social policy, governance, and institutional design.

Public policy is where welfare theory meets institutional constraint. Health systems, tax-and-transfer programs, and regulatory agencies all make decisions that implicitly weigh one person's welfare against another's — usually via formal tools built directly on welfare-economic foundations, such as quality-adjusted life years or cost-effectiveness thresholds.

What this topic covers

• How agencies quantify welfare for cost-effectiveness analysis
• Distributive questions in social insurance and the welfare state
• Measurement tools: QALYs, DALYs, and their ethical critiques
• Institutional design tradeoffs between efficiency and fairness