Welfare work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences

Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences

Work requirements in means-tested transfer programs have grown in importance in the U.S. and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximized. Here we consider a case where society is paternalistic and instead has preferences over t...

Non-paternalistic altruism and welfare economics

Bergstrom showed that a necessary condition for a Pareto optimum with non-paternalistic altruism is classification as a selfish Pareto optimum. This paper shows that Bergstrom’s result does not generalize to the benefit-cost analysis of generic changes in public goods. There may exist good projects that will be rejected by a selfish-benefit cost test, a selfish test error. Selfish test error is...

Welfare, Work Requirements, and Dependant-Care

 This article considers the justice of requiring employment as a condition of receiving public assistance. While none of the main theories of justice prohibits work requirements, the arguments in their favour are weak. Arguments based on reciprocity fail to explain why only means-tested public benefits should be subject to work requirements, and why unpaid dependant care work should not...

Credible monetary policy with private government preferences

This paper provides recursive methods for analyzing the credible equilibria of an incomplete information monetary policy game. The policy game is one in which a discretionary government has a short run temptation to engage in a surprise monetary expansion. It also has the opportunity to mimic a government that is committed to the optimal ex ante monetary policy actions. We derive an algorithm f...

Child Welfare Work