Sentencing policy, implied demographic welfare weights, and the theory of sentencing reform
借鉴商品税福利权重推断方法，从美国量刑政策中反推出不同人口群体的隐含福利权重，并计算了能改善福利的量刑改革方向。
Different groups of people experience varying degrees of different externalities. By a government's choice of expenditures to control externalities, it affects different members of the population differently. These choices implicitly “value” the welfare of members of different groups. This paper adapts the framework developed by Ahmad and Stern (Journal of Public Economics, 1984, 25, 259–298) to infer welfare weights underlying a system of commodity taxation, to infer the welfare weights implicitly attached to different population groups by US sentencing policy. Welfare-improving directions of sentencing reform are also calculated.