This paper examines the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and welfare programs on the labor supply of single mothers. The EITC consists of an earning subsidy program in the form of marginal tax credits to the working poor. The presence of different marginal tax rates at the various...

This paper reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential usefulness of apparently inefficient policy instruments in overcoming the self-selection constraints...

The literature on shock-responsive social protection focuses on operational features that improve the speed and reach of the response, but little is known about the optimal design of emergency social protection responses in terms of which programs to use, information about the people affected,...

In a competitive-equilibrium analysis of giving to charity, we show that strategic complementarity between individual giving and aggregate giving can lead to multiple equilibria. This provides a possible explanation for observed heterogeneity in giving. It is possible, but not necessary, that at...

This paper studies how society votes on the payroll taxes of a basic income and a social health insurance scheme. Individuals differ along the two most important dimensions when it comes to the design of the two welfare schemes, namely, income and risk. Even though the introduction of a basic...

This paper compares for 13 Latin American countries the poverty and inequality impacts of cash transfer programs that are given to all children and the elderly (that is, "categorical" transfers), to programs of equal budget that are confined to the poor within each population group (that is,...

Well-being and poverty eradication is focal issue in debut and policy making world over and cash transfer programmes and schemes along with public service schemes emerge as technique of social protection and short run poverty mitigating scheme popularly in Latin American and other development...