Federal crop insurance began in 1938 as a focused program to correct certain perceived market failures. It has transformed into a massive wealth transfer scheme that is frequently the subject of supposed legislative reforms. Yet each wave of changes has, for the most part, moved the program...

A large literature on ex ante moral hazard in income insurance emphasizes that the individual can affect the probability of an income loss by choice of lifestyle and hence, the degree of risk-taking. The much smaller literature on moral hazard ex post mainly analyzes how a quot;moral hazard...

Chile approved in early 2008 the replacement of her two current non-contributory subsidies for the old poor for a unified program with a pioneering design, with phase-in ending in 2012. This paper describes the political economy of this reform and evaluates it with regards to efficiency and...

Current trends and policies imply unsustainable growth in federal Medicaid outlays. Making conservative assumptions about future growth in Medicaid enrollment and spending per beneficiary, this paper estimates that the present value of federal Medicaid outlays over the next 100 years will take...

Bankruptcy scholars generally agree that consumer bankruptcy functions, at least in part, as a form of social insurance. It does so by allowing individuals to discharge unsecured debts that they incur and cannot pay as a result of the occurrence of one or more particular events or circumstances....

This paper empirically examines to what extent political factors explain different performances in income redistribution in countries that vary in terms of size of the public sector, tax systems, political institutions and governance. In line with the theory, we use the difference in the ex ante...

This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider in-work benefits based on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the...

Does it matter for the success of fiscal consolidation programmes that they are fair? This question has never been empirically addressed despite its profound importance especially since many developed countries have embarked on fiscal consolidation programmes, which in many cases have led to...

This inquiry analyzes how political orientations shape welfare states and labour market institutions when seeking to reduce poverty. In order to identify effects of these two key variables, we conduct a panel regression analysis that includes two poverty measures: poverty rates before and after...

The effects of the economic crisis on the public sector deficit and the new demographic and social scenarios that have emerged have placed the welfare state at the core of the debate on reforms in the public sector. This article analyses the current situation as regards social spending in Spain,...