It is not a question of advocating for the elimination of all government intervention in the economy, as many government programs do generate important benefits to the public. This paper calls for a new way of thinking in public policymaking. This new paradigm must simultaneously help to achieve the nation's social goals while allowing business to pursue more efficient production of better good...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk faced by workers. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, longitudinal data on workers are used to estimate time-varying individual income risk parameters in various manufacturing sectors. The estimated income risk parameters and data on trade barriers are then used to analyze the relationship b...

This paper describes a new approach to large-scale simulation modeling for the analysis of public welfare policies. Whereas conventional microanalytic simulation models extrapolate the dynamic behavior of a representative sample of individuals to the corresponding target population, the new modeling technique disaggregates an exogenous demographic forecast into enough detail to evaluate the imp...

Recent events have renewed the debate on the desirability of imposing institutional constraints on government policy. This paper investigates how policy constraints discipline the behavior of discretionary governments in dynamic stochastic monetary economies and evaluates the welfare properties of such restrictions. Across a variety of possible shocks, the best policy is to impose a minimum sur...

INTRODUCTION The finding that there is a social gradient in health has prompted considerable interest in public health circles. Recent influential works describing health inequities and their causes do not always argue cogently for a policy framework that would drive the most appropriate solutions differentially across the social gradient This paper aims to develop a practice heuristic for prop...

For much of the postwar period, the Australian welfare state has been misunderstood by overseas social policy commentators. The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially compensated for by a system of wage regulation that has prevented waged poverty and delivered a reduced disparity of incomes. The strong emphasis on means-testing of benefits has not had the stigmatizing eff...

In this research I integrate the theory of welfare stigma (Moffitt, 1983) and the theory of optimal income taxation. I study optimal income taxation and an optimal welfare program within a unified framework, taking welfare stigma into account. In the framework, I assume that the government has two policy instruments: general income taxation and a welfare program. I assume that individuals are h...