This paper develops estimates of lifetime money's worth and redistributional outcomes under the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program for all past, present, and future birth cohorts affected by the program through the cohort born in 2100. The estimates presented in this study...

This paper analyses the role of social safety nets in the form of redistributional transfers and wage subsidies. It is argued that public welfare programs can be viewed as a crime-preventing or disruption-preventing devices because they tend to increase the opportunity cost of engaging in crime...

In this paper we explore whether the constitutional text has any practical meaning for welfare policy. To examine the empirical importance of the constitution, we first constructed for 68 countries an index of constitutional commitment to social security in five areas: Old Age, disability and...

This paper surveys the literature on the political economy of social security. We review models that address the following questions: (i) Why do social security programs that transfer resources from young and middle-aged workers to the elderly exist? (ii) What are the economic and political...

Why are Bismarckian social security systems associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income in-equality than Beveridgean systems? These facts are puzzling for political economy theories of social security which predict that Beveridgean...

The core emphasis of rules-based fiscal legislation at the subnational level in India is to achieve debt sustainability through a numerical ceiling on borrowing and the use of borrowed resources for public capital investment by phasing out revenue deficits. Using the Arellano Bond Panel...

This Article argues that employment subsidies could help ameliorate the situation of low-income workers but that they concede too much to the work-centered agenda that motivated the 1996 welfare legislation that enacted TANF. The case for employment subsidies, the Article argues, rests on...

Welfare programs including disability benefits have been considered as an efficient way of delivering transfers to the needy. This paper addresses the importance of administrative cost of welfare systems by focusing on an agency problem arising between the government and social workers, whose...

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to distinguish the effect of...