The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant (TANF). TANF substitutes a block grant for the open-ended matching grants that helped...

The case for income redistribution by government is frequently made in the economics literature, but the case against is rarely encountered. This article is an attempt to fill that gap by enumerating and explaining the major arguments against income redistribution. Seven arguments are discussed....

This article is a response to the several criticisms made by Dahlby and Ruggeri in their comment on Browning's 1993 article dealing with the marginal cost of redistribution (MCR). The author concludes that the findings of the 1993 article require little or no modification. Most significantly, it...

The marginal cost of redistribution is the real economic cost to upper-income households per dollar of benefit to lower-income households; it exceeds 1 because of the efficiency costs of redistributive policies. This article examines the determinants of this marginal cost for linear income tax...

Many economists refer to phenomena whereby the behavior of people affects the cost of some subsidy or alters the revenues from some tax as externalities. The author refers to these as “fiscal externalitiesâ€; an example is smoking imposing costs on taxpayers due to the existence of...

This article addresses three related but distinct issues relevant to the valuation of in-kind transfers. First, it shows that the census bureau's widely cited recipient value approach substantially underestimates the true cash equivalent value of in-kind transfers. Second, it shows that the true...