We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed...

In this paper we develop an approach to measuring inequality and poverty that recognizes the fact that individuals within households may have both different preferences and differential access to resources. We argue that a measure based on estimates of the sharing rule is inadequate as an...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

Globalization, in the form of financial flows, which is always advantageous on an aggregative level, typically creates winners and losers, if left exclusively to market forces. The effects of financial globalization on income inequality depends on whether the country exports its capital to the...

We develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of welfare state and immigration policies, featuring three groups of voters: skilled workers, unskilled workers, and old retirees. The welfare-state is modeled by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner...

We develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of welfare state, featuring three groups of voters: skilled workers, unskilled workers, and old retirees. The welfare-state is modeled by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner to capture the essence of...

A variety of criteria are relevant for evaluating alternative policies in democratic societies composed of persons with diverse values and perspectives. In this paper, we consider alternative criteria for evaluating the welfare state, and the data required to operationalize them. We examine sets...

We study the effects of immigration on native welfare in a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a redistributive welfare state. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of...

It has been well recognized that population ageing could generate structural changes centered around the dwindling labor force, on one hand, and the expanding dependency on the generosity of the welfare state, on the other hand. Ageing-related welfare state policy entails both fiscal issues and...

This paper argues that the social nature of humans, absent from the standard economic model, is crucial to understand our large modern social states and why concerns about inequality are so pervasive. A social solution arises when a situation is resolved at the group level (rather than the...