The Olivia framework is a set of concepts and measures that, when mature, will allow users to describe, in a consistent and integrated manner, everything about individuals and institutions that is of potential interest to social policy. The present paper summarizes the current stage of...

An employment survey among people in Toronto who left Ontario Works - a classic "work-first" regime - shows clear secondary labour market status. Most interventions typical of work-first programmes did not have a positive effect on job quality: contrary to the "stepping stones" theory that poor...

John Taylor has found that entertaining his students is an effective tool for economic education in his classroom teaching. The success of Freakonomics has demonstrated that how we package the economic toolkit can be not only educational but profitable. In this paper, it is demonstrated how the...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of social security to address two questions. First, how is social security sustained? Second, how does inequality affect the size of social security, and can the theoretical predictions be consistent with the observed puzzling...