Welfare and Paternalism
نویسندگان
چکیده
Citizens’ desires to assist the poor reflect a mixture of insurance motives, altruism, and paternalism. Consequently, government policies toward the poor have always been a mixture of income supports and regulations of recipient behavior. Unfortunately, there have been very few analyses of the how these distinct motives interact to generate various policies to the poor. In this paper, we develop such a model where a political decisionmaker has policy preferences generated from a mixture of considerations include social insurance, altruism, and paternalism. The decisionmaker’s ability to pursue these goals, however, is constrained by the moral hazard and adverse selection inherent in income support policies.
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