Inflation-adjusted spending on means-tested subsidies have increased sharply since 2007, and most of this growth was due to changes in eligibility rules, and increases in subsidies per eligible person, rather than increases in the number of people who would have been eligible under pre-recession...

Equality can multiply due to the complementarity between wage determination and welfare spending. A more equal wage distribution fuels welfare generosity via political competition. A more generous welfare state fuels wage equality further via its support to weak groups in the labor market....

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...

There is no evaluation of the consequences of Disability Insurance (DI) receipt that captures the effects on households' net income and consumption expenditure, family labor supply, or benefits from other programs. Combining detailed register data from Norway with an instrumental variables...

The Great Depression of the 1930s led contemporaries to worry that people hit by hard times would turn to crime in their efforts to survive. Franklin Roosevelt argued that the unprecedented and massive expansion in relief efforts quot;struck at the roots of crimequot; by providing subsistence...

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government...

This paper reassesses the long-term fiscal position of Korea using Generational Accounting, modified to reflect the special features of the Korean fiscal situation, such as prospective changes in public pension benefit profiles and social welfare expenditures due to the maturing of public...

Government transfers to older persons in Canada are one of the largest and fastest growing" components of the government budget. I provide an overview of the interaction between these" transfer programs and retirement behavior. I begin by documenting historical trends in labor force"...

In addition to traditional forms of private and public medical insurance, two other large programs help pay for costs associated with ill health. In 2007, Workers Compensation (WC) insurance provided $55.4 billion in medical care and cash benefits to employees who are injured at work or contract...

International economic integration increases exposure to external risk and intensifies domestic demands for social insurance through government programs. But international economic integration also reduces the ability of governments to respond to such pressure by rendering the tax base...