Arthur is the inaugural holder of the Barbara A. and Patrick E. Roche chair in economics at Boston College and a Research Associate of the IFS. His research interests include econometric theory, consumer demand analysis, and economic aggregation issues.
Education
PhD Management Applied Economics, Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1984
BSc Mathematics, Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1978
The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis.
The exact measurement of the welfare costs of tax and price reform requires a detailed knowledge of individual preferences. Typically, first-order approximations of welfare costs are calculated avoiding detailed knowledge of substitution effects.
This paper asks to what extent simple approximations can be used to measure the welfare costs of tax reform and evaluates the magnitude of the biases for a plausible size tax reform.
