Should developing countries give all of their citizens enough money to live on? Interest in
this idea has grown enormously in recent years, reflecting both positive results from a …

This paper interprets case studies and theory on community involvement in beneficiary
selection and benefit delivery for social safety nets. Several considerations should be …

Is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies? We
answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that …

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as
providing publicly financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide …

In June 1995, the Swedish parliament decided to cut the replacement rate in unemployment
insurance from 80% to 75%, a change that took effect on 1 January 1996. The paper exploits …

We consider a two‐period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ by
age and by productivity. In such a setting, a redistributive pay‐as‐you‐go system is …

In his study of the New Poor Laws in nineteenth-century England, Karl Polanyi (2001) was
centrally preoccupied with the forms of politics that surrounded this initiative, particularly the …

Politics, ageing and pensions What is the future of social security systems in OECD
countries? We suggest that the answer belongs to the realm of politics, and evaluate how …

Countries with low intragenerational redistribution in social security systems (Bismarckian)
are associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension …

We argue that economic and demographic factors play a relatively small role in the old-age
crisis; political factors are far more important. A benevolent social planner can address the …