This paper highlights the issue of whether government bonds are net wealth as an important one in the monetarist controversy. In particular it is shown that the standard IS-LM model and its conclusions arise as a special case of a more general macroeconomic model which results when government bonds are fully perceived as collective wealth. When, however, the tax liabilities required to service that debt are fully capitalized, a model with monetarist conclusions emerges.

The use of the compensation principle in cost-benefit analysis as a means of separating the efficiency and distributional effects of a project is theoretically suspect for a number of reasons. One difficulty is the lack of a necessary and sufficient criterion for determining that a compensation test is passed in an economy where consumers' and producers' prices are not the same. For this paper we establish such a criterion for projects that are small in the differential sense. The criterion requires the calculation of a set of "shadow prices" which is a weighted average of the consumers' and producers' price vectors.

A familiar result in the economic theory of the family is Becker's rotten-kid theorem. This theorem states that altruism by a family member will lead other selfish members to act efficiently from the family viewpoint. We extend Becker's one-period model to two periods and show that parental altruism can result in an inefficiency known in other contexts as the Samaritan's dilemma. Implications of this for transfer arrangements within the family and for the Ricardian equivalence theorem are drawn.