Investing in social protection in sub-Saharan Africa has taken on a new urgency as HIV and AIDS interact with other drivers of poverty to simultaneously destabilise livelihoods systems and family and community safety nets. Cash transfer programmes already reach millions of people in South Africa, and in other countries in southern and East Africa plans are underway to reach tens and eventually ...

The pervasive use of merchandise (i.e., non-cash) incentives in sales compensation plans is an empirical and theoretical puzzle given the supposed superiority of cash incentives in the standard theory (i.e., principal-agent models) and the scant, and contradictory empirical evidence. We conducted a large scale field intervention that switched 580 salespeople at a large frozen food manufacturer ...

This study uses three rounds of panel data between October 1998 and November 1999 and covering 506 villages and 24,000 households in rural Mexico, to examine how the replacement of pre-existing subsidy programs by a conditional cash transfer program such as PROGRESA (the Health, Education and Nutrition Program) affects the consumption smoothing of households. The results obtained are consistent...

H ow much reduction in inequality and poverty does latin america accomplish through taxes and transfers? How progressive1 are revenue-collection and social-spending patterns? an in-depth fiscal incidence analysis applied to argentina’s urban areas, where three-fourths of the population lives, as well as to Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and uruguay, finds the following: 1. the extent of income ...

Two decades of federal and state demonstration projects and experiments with cash welfare in the United States culminated with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). PRWORA, aka welfare reform, is widely viewed as the most fundamental reform to the U.S. social safety net since the New Deal by its dismantling of the major cash entitle...

Welfare Effects of the Euro Cash Changeover Using merged data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP), this paper applies a parametric difference-in-differences approach to assess the real effects of the introduction of the euro on subjective well-being. A complementary nonparametric approach is also used to analyze the impact of difficulties wit...

The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation and to illustrate benefits and problems of linking micro and macro models by analysing flat tax proposals for Germany. The analysis shows that a personal income flat tax can indeed overcome the fundamental equity efficiency trade-off while simultaneously increasing the tax revenue. However, this result does not hold for a f...

Several frictions restrict the government’s ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too high. This paper shows that limitations in asset observability have important consequences for the tax...

The paper discusses the methodology and preliminary results of an investigation of the redistributive effects of social security contributions (SSC), personal income tax (PIT), public pensions as well as means-tested and non-means-tested cash benefits in Croatia. The transition from a preto a post-tax-and-benefit income is analyzed in order to reveal which instruments contribute most to the red...