Are you an economics graduate student casting about for dissertation topics? I have a few ideas for you. As part of the rewriting of Freedom in the 50 States, I’ve been reviewing the economic literature on how various public policies affect consumer and producer surplus, deadweight loss, and so on. We use an estimate of “victim cost” for each policy to weight the policy. The weighted sum of policies comprises the freedom index. Interestingly, the literature on some public policy issues is quite thin. That makes it difficult for us to come up with weights, and sometimes we have to do no more than guess.
Without further ado, here is a list of research questions to which I for one would like to see credible answers:
- How productive are publicly owned hospitals relative to for-profit and charitable ones?
- How accurate are people in estimating how much of their state’s…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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