A large body of research focuses on two important rationales for government subsidies to college students: positive fiscal externalities from a larger tax base, and liquidity constraints among students. This paper provides a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of these mechanisms. I...

A common finding of the optimal unemployment insurance literature is that the optimal replacement rate is around 50%; however, a key assumption is that UI is the only government spending activity. I show that optimal UI levels are dramatically reduced by the fact that UI is a small part of...