Sociological research on poverty and social policy has been dominated by analyses of the “welfare state” and formal government programs. Less attention has focused on charitable and non-profit organizations. Food banks, which have become an increasingly important support for those in need since the first such Canadian organization appeared in Edmonton in 1981, have been largely ignored by acade...

Is the observed large increase in consumer indebtedness since 1970 beneficial for U.S. consumers? This paper quantitatively investigates the macroeconomic and welfare implications of relaxing borrowing constraints using a model with preferences featuring temptation and self-control. The model can capture two contrasting views: the positive view, which links increased indebtedness to financial i...

Over the course of the past half a century, a vast amount of research has been undertaken on the welfare state comprising a wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical traditions. However, exactly how such plurality should be regarded has been less than clear since there has notably been a lack of discourse within the field of comparative political economy with regard to possible ways ...

Public health care systems in countries all over the world are confronted with increasing difficulties. The problems are mainly economic, but they also reflect difficulties of adaptation to changes both in society as a whole and within the health care services. The atmosphere of a crisis results from internal struggles within the health care system and with other welfare and social services tha...

Two priority-setting frameworks to decide how to allocate limited resources among available treatments were developed, the first one based on cost-effectiveness and the second one based on cost-effectiveness and a social welfare function (SWF). The framework based on cost effectiveness gives a higher priority to therapies with lower average or incremental cost-effectiveness ratios. The framewor...

A Nordic WelfAre Model? The Nordic countries are all established welfare states, and there has for some time existed a notion of a distinctive Nordic or Scandinavian welfare state; it is often understood in terms of broad, tax-financed public responsibility and legislated, collective, and universalistic solutions that respect employment interest yet aim at welfare and equity goals (1). Lately, ...

In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal hires an agent to perform a task. The principal cares about the task’s output but has no control over it. The agent can perform the task at different effort intensities, and that choice affects the task’s output. To provide an incentive to the agent to work hard and since his effort intensity cannot be observed, the principal ties the agent’...

Incorporating budget constraints into the analysis of auctions has become increasingly important, as they model practical settings more accurately. The social welfare function, which is the standard measure of efficiency in auctions, is inadequate for settings with budgets, since there may be a large disconnect between the value a bidder derives from obtaining an item and what can be liquidated...