A growing body of research indicates that welfare attitudes may be strongly shaped by negative perceptions of Blacks. This raises questions about what might inhibit the racialization of welfare attitudes. In this vein, a long line of work indicating that education leads to increased tolerance suggests that the relationship between negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be weaker ...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We show that when private education is available, the degree of elitism that maximizes social mobility i...

Higher welfare support levels diminish the relative value of education according to standard economic theory. However, studies based on the negative income tax experimentshavefound that higher welfare support levels increase participation in the educational system. This study examines a nonexperimental source of data to determine the effect of higher expected state-level welfare benefits on hig...

Immigrants in a Booming Economy: Analysing their Earnings and Welfare Dependence * Ireland’s exceptional economic growth in recent years has led to an influx of immigrants. Given the favourable economic climate into which these immigrants are arriving, it is interesting to ask how their earnings and welfare dependence compare with the native population. To the extent that strong economic growth...

A model is developed which allows us to examine the welfare effects of alternative methods of financing access to higher education. Under an extreme specification of the social welfare function, it is shown that it does not matter whether higher education is financed privately or through the exchequer. Under a more general specification of the social welfare function, conditions may be derived ...

We investigate the relative merits of unconditional cash transfers (UCT), conditional cash transfers (CCT), and improvements in education quality on efficiency and welfare. In our setting some parents under-invest in their children's education because capital market imperfections prevent them from borrowing. When credit constrained households can be perfectly targeted by the government, we show...

Today’s welfare system does not encourage postsecondary education, focusing instead on services aimed at immediate employment. The loss of postsecondary education as a route out of poverty for welfare recipients may be detrimental to some women. College graduation is associated with lower rates of return to aid and post-welfare poverty than attendance without graduation or no attendance. Howeve...

This paper examines the degree of elitism of public education under two different social objectives. It illustrates a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. In the absence of private supplementary education, utilitarian welfare increases with the degree of elitism of the public education system. On the other hand, elitism decreases the steady state proportion of heterogenous dy...

Previous analyses of population aging mainly focused on the social security implications of the aging trend. This paper addresses aging in an open economy framework with two regions that have politically responsive fiscal policy regarding education finance. Demographic shocks start an economic growth process but results are sensitive to a critical parameter in the model that indicates return to...