There has been consideration of alternative social security financing methods throughout the world during the last two decades. One alternative adopted in several countries is the privatization of so-called pay-as-you-go financing systems. The purpose of this study is to estimate social benefits...

On March 11, 2011 the strongest recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant Station. The triple 2011 disaster has had immense impacts on people life, health and property, social infrastructure and...

Indonesian traditional villagers have a tradition for the sake of their own social and economic security named “nyumbang”. There are wide variations of the traditions across the archipelago, and we revisit an observation to one in Subang, West Java, Indonesia. The paper discusses and employs...

This study investigates the impact of recent crises in Argentina (including the severe downturn of 2001–02) on health and education outcomes. The identification strategy relies on both the inter-temporal and the cross-provincial co-variation between changes in regional GDP and outcomes by...

Evidence that local tax and expenditure limits (TELs) for public K-12 schools lower student achievement is widely attributed to the effects of reduced funding, but our results cast doubt on reduced funding as the primary explanation for negative effects of TELs in the context of school-finance...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...

We evaluate the effects of state-provided financial incentives for biotech companies, which are part of a growing trend of placed-based policies designed to spur innovation clusters. We estimate that the adoption of subsidies for biotech employers by a state raises the number of star biotech...

To what degree do economists disagree about key economic questions? To provide evidence, we make use of the responses to a series of questions posed to a distinguished panel of economists put together by the Chicago School of Business. Based on our analysis, we find a broad consensus on these...

Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) survey an important new literature using income tax-based data to measure the share of income held by top income groups. But changes in tax legislation that expand the tax base to include income sources (e.g. capital gains, dividends, etc.) disproportionately...

A rise in population caused by increased immigration, is sometimes accompanied by concerns that the increase in population puts additional or differential pressure on welfare services which might affect the net fiscal contribution of immigrants. The UK and Germany have experienced significant...