The paper reviews the educational and evaluation experience with the widely known Perry Preschool Program. Basically, the Perry Program generated short-term IQ gains that evaporated within 2 years, followed by long-term gains in attendance, academic achievement, graduation rates and earnings,...

Private educational firms claimed to be able to substantially increase the reading and mathematics achievement test scores of disadvantaged students. The OEO Performance Contracting Experiment tested this claim. Although analysis of experimental effects is complicated by imperfect matching of...

This paper reviews the long-term financial problems facing the U.S. Social Security system. Not only is the system out of long-term actuarial balance, but implicit rates of return on worker contributions are low and dropping. The paper discusses different approaches for dealing with the twin...

This paper is an exploratory attempt to view the role that social experiments in general, and the income maintenance experiments and work/welfare demonstrations in particular, have played in the policy process through the lens provided by the knowledge ...

The importance of migration of AFDC beneficiaries as a determinant of state benefit levels is examined in this paper. A pooled cross-section time-series model fit to state data over the seventies indicates that benefit levels in other states have a positive influence on own-state benefits and a...

This paper discusses the report of the 1994 Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security, of which the author was chair. The system is out of long-term actuarial balance and, as a maturing defined benefit pay-as-you-go system, is giving younger cohorts ever lower returns on their payroll...

The paper develops a procedure for evaluating the social benefits of income redistribution programs. The procedure makes social benefit a function of both the mean and the variance of family income and needs of the recipients over time, with sensitivity tests to see how benefits change under...