The major economic story of the last decade has been the surge and collapse of house prices worldwide. Yet political economists have had little to say about how this critical phenomenon affects citizens’ welfare and their demands from government. This article develops a novel theoretical argument linking housing prices to social policy preferences and policy outcomes. I argue that homeowners, p...

This article contains the latest information on the historical development and present status of all the major U.S. social insurance and public aid programs under the Social Security Act: the Social Security program (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance); Railroad Retirement; Public Employee Retirement; Unemployment Insurance; Workers’ Compensation; State programs for Temporary Disabili...

We analyse how the welfare state, i.e., social insurance that works through redistributive taxation, should respond to increases in risks and to increases in the cost of operating the welfare state. With respect to risks, we distinguish between risks that can be insured and such that cannot (background risks). Insurable risks can be reduced by costly individual selfinsurance and by costly socia...

BACKGROUND In this study the focus is on social insurance officers judging applications for disability pensions. The number of applications for disability pension increased during the late 1990s, which has resulted in an increasing number of disability pensions in Sweden. A more restrictive attitude towards the clients has however evolved, as societal costs have increased and governmental guide...

BACKGROUND Physicians who hold medical disability assessment interviews (social insurance physicians) are probably influenced by stereotypes of claimants, especially because they have limited time available and they have to make complicated decisions. Because little is known about the influences of stereotyping on assessment interviews, the objectives of this paper were to qualitatively investi...

Social insurance reforms that have been instituted in rapid succession in recent years have established a common orientation of reduced benefits instead of rising insurance premiums. For example, in medical system reforms carried out over the past two years, insurance benefit expenses were practically reduced by, for example, an increase in insured copayments and a higher eligibility age for El...

Since the 1950s there have been numerous contributions proposing solutions to failures of social systems. However, we have hardly found a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to a failed social system beyond “stove-piped” academic disciplines. This paper identifies a new holistic and interdisciplinary systems engineering methodology of systems engineering for a social system through a case s...

Social Health Insurance has been used as an approach to increase efficiency of healthcare system and consumer satisfaction in provision of healthcare services. Many developed countries have successfully planned and implemented insurance models which provide almost universal coverage and addresses issues of equity. The phenomenon is established however, developing countries especially Eastern Me...

In the modern welfare state a substantial part of an individual’s tax bill is transferred back to the same individual taxpayer in the form of social transfers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance through mandatory savings accounts. We analyze the behavioral and welfare effects of compulsory savings accounts in an intertemporal model with uncertainty, endogenous invo...