The paper reviews paradigms of welfare, principally the industrialization thesis, the three worlds of welfare and social investment states and shows how these link to wider public policies and underlying assumptions. It locates explanations in historical and contemporary contexts. The literature...

The effects of capital requirements on risk-taking and welfare are studied in a stochastic overlapping generations model of endogenous growth with banking, limited liability, and government guarantees. Capital producers face a choice between a safe technology and a risky (but socially...

Inequity plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in many dimensions.We revisit the concept of inequity, whether across states of world (uncertainty), across individuals (inequality) and across generations (intergenerational equity), using a common framework generalizing the...