Drawing on data from various sources, this article compares the 1980 and 1983 levels of spending on social security and health in the United States with the levels in seven other countries: Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan. Currently, in the United States, social security is customarily understood to include only old-age, survivors, and disability ...

States are shifting Medicaid spending on long-term services and supports from institutional to home and community-based services, a process known as rebalancing. Using fifteen years of state expenditure data, a statistical model was developed to assess the effect of rebalancing on overall spending for long-term services and supports. The model indicates that spending is affected by the way reba...

Does high defence spending limit the growth of public health investment? Using comparative data from 31 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010, we find little evidence that defence crowds out public health spending. Whether measured in terms of long-term levels or short-term changes, per capita defence and health spending positively and significantly correlate. To investigate the possibility that...

Although Medicare Managed Care (MMC) was introduced as a way to reduce costs, the effect of the program on total Medicare spending is unknown. Current literature has focused on three conflicting sets of findings including spillover effects from managed care which reduce total Medicare spending and positive selection into managed care and overpayments to managed care plans relative to Fee-for-Se...

Although spending rates on health care and social services vary substantially across the states, little is known about the possible association between variation in state-level health outcomes and the allocation of state spending between health care and social services. To estimate that association, we used state-level repeated measures multivariable modeling for the period 2000-09, with region...

Meaghan Duetsch is an economist in the Branch of Information and Analysis, Division of Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics. MEAGHAN DUETSCH Do single women spend their money differently than single men do? If so, can their spending differences be attributed to differences in characteristics between the two groups? In addition, have the spending patterns of single men and si...

The forces that are most likely to set the ultimate limits on social spending as a share of GDP are not those usually imagined. The deadweight costs of such spending, and the taxes behind them, fail to show the predicted upward spiral. The experience of 1960–1981 shows a major role for shifts in relative age-group sizes, but with an approaching sunset to the effect of aging on social-spending p...

This paper estimates the “jobs multiplier” of fiscal spending using the state-level allocations of federal stimulus funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Specifically, I estimate the relationship between state-level federal ARRA spending and the change in states’ employment outcomes from the time the Act was passed (February 2009) to some later month (through June 2...

Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts (e.g. Britain, France, Japan, and Australia) but very few of these systems use proportional representation (PR). If positive effects from spending are robust, however, then we would also expect to find that they generalize to systems using more proportional rules. Our study ex...