Ever since the government issued a deluge of notifications making Aadhaar mandatory for one scheme after another, the Aadhaar debate has substantially heated up both in the public space and also in the parliament. However, the debate has more often than not resulted in inflexible binary positions without adequate analysis, making it rather difficult for an impartial, lay, but keen, observer to ...

Local beer breweries in Burkina Faso absorb a considerable amount of urban woodfuel demand. We assess the woodfuel savings caused by the adoption of improved brewing stoves by these micro-breweries and estimate the implied welfare eff ects through the woodfuel market on private households as well as the environmental eff ect. We fi nd substantial wood savings among the breweries and, subsequent...

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence th...

Poor mothers and their families constitute a core dilemma for a social welfare system that aims primarily to encourage and keep workers in the labor force. Public income transfers to these and other marginalized groups may be viewed as disincentives to seek paid work and have been characterized in Canada by stinginess and contradictions since the beginning of the XX century. This paper discusse...

This paper considers the general equilibrium and welfare effects of a linear progressive income tax with entrepreneurship and moral hazard. A competitive intermediation sector diversifies risk associated with entrepreneurial activity, but full risk consolidation is prevented by moral hazard. Since effort is not observable, risk bearing of entrepreneurs is required for incentive reasons. The ext...

Becky Blank’s paper is a sweeping, comprehensive, and balanced review and assessment of what social scientists and policy analysts have learned about the effects of the landmark U. S. national welfare reform legislation of 1996. The policy shift embodied in this legislation (and the responses of each of 50 states to it) is the largest policy change affecting the potential welfare population sin...

Using the integer programming approach introduced by Sethuraman, Teo, and Vohra (2003), we extend the analysis of the preference domains containing an inseparable ordered pair, initiated by Kalai and Ritz (1978). We show that these domains admit not only Arrovian social welfare functions “without ties,” but also Arrovian social welfare functions “with ties,” since they satisfy the strictly deco...

It has been ten years since the welfare reform law was signed by President Clinton amid predictions of disaster from the left. Thanks to provisions in the legislation itself that provided millions of dollars for research, to an unprecedented level of research sponsored by foundations, to data reported by states to the federal government, and to national data collected and reported on a routine ...

HUMANE SLAUGHTER: THE Ante-Mortem HANDLING Humane slaughter is the technical and scientific proceeding set that guarantees the animal welfare since loading, in the rural property, to the bleeding. The slaughter must be performed without unnecessary suffering. The humane conditions must be presented during preslaughter handling. The animal stunning is considered the most critical operation durin...

In this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life-cycle. We construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic proliles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures. Simulated expenditure paths based on ...