Governments in new democracies launch social policies with the purported goal of alleviating the effects of poverty among the most vulnerable households, usually low income families with children. However, this goal is can be thwarted by the clientelistic distribution of social policies'...

There is a burgeoning literature on the significance and distribution of wealth in the rich world. It mainly focuses on the top. Wealth remains remarkably absent from the analysis of poverty and the redistributive effectiveness of welfare systems. This paper shows that real and financial assets...

Interventions that combine unconditional permanent housing with support services, known as Housing First approaches, generally improve housing outcomes for people who have experienced chronic homelessness. However, little is known about their long-run outcomes or the consequences of ending such...

The implementation of social policies is often hampered by the fact that local decision-makers may be unwilling or unable to implement the policy as intended by the central government. In contrast to research that focuses on incentivizing and holding local decision makers accountable, we examine...

In Germany, two observations can be tracked over the past 15 to 20 years: First, income inequality has constantly increased while, second, the average household size has been declining dramatically. The analysis of income distribution relies on equivalence-weighted incomes, which take into...

The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we investigate whether politicians use resources from the federal budget as a strategy to maintain and expand their political capital. Second, we examine whether such a strategy is rewarded by voters who elect politicians who assist their...

This paper analyzes how changes in school expenditures affect dropout rates and standardized test scores based on data from 465 school districts in New York during the 2003/04 to the 2008/09 school years. Past traditional regression approaches show inconsistent results of school expenditures...

The public economic burden of shifting trends in population health remains uncertain. Sustained increases in obesity, diabetes, and other diseases could reduce life expectancy - with a concomitant decrease in the public-sector's annuity burden - but these savings may be offset by worsening...