The fallout from the global economic downturn of 2008-09 is a continuing source of stress on families and a constraint on government policies. How can social policies contribute to a quick and equitable recovery from the crisis and how can they best respond to the difficulties that households...

In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changes that have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens with adequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on data for 24 European Union...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

Since 1990, most pension plans have shifted the responsibility for directing pension assets to the employee. This study summarizes some of the possible explanations for this rapid shift toward participant direction and uses IRS Form 5500 data to investigate the effect of worker and plan...