Whether poor single mothers move in response to welfare benefits has important implications for social policy in a federal system. Many scholars claim that welfare does not affect migration. These claims are not definitive, however, because the models underlying them rely on problematic assumptions and do not adequately control for nonwelfare determinants of migration. I address these shortcomi...

Social optimization problems maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities over feasible allocations that satisfy certain constraints. In this paper, we propose a method that determines endogenous individual weights for such problems. We …rst provide three axioms which uniquely determine, for any welfare function, the contribution of a bundle of goods to that welfare function. We then de…ne...

We propose a framework to understand the distribution of individual wellbeing and its change over time with an application to the U.S. elderly population. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate life-cycle dynamics and simulate individual outcome paths starting from age sixty. We use an expected utility framework and the simulated profiles to construct a measure of individu...

In Germany, imposition of benefit cuts for non-compliant welfare recipients depends on the policy of the local welfare agencies resulting in considerable regional variation, expressed in milder and stricter sanction regimes. Findings from international studies show, that benefit sanctions can substantially increase individual employment uptake. This raises the question, whether a stricter use o...

The paper deals with the measurement of household welfare in a general and flexible framework: It defines measures of individual and household willingness to pay (and to accept) and examines their relationship. The sum of the individual welfare measures forms only an upper bound for the corresponding measure of household welfare. The bounds are tightened by introducing additional assumptions ab...

This paper considers the problem of maximizing social welfare subject to participation constraints. It is shown that for an income allocation method that maximizes a social welfare function there is a monotonic relationship between the incomes allocated to individual agents in a given coalition (with at least three members) and its participation constraint if and only if the aggregate income to...

Recently published studies that investigate the effect of benefit cuts on the employment prospects of unemployed show that sanctions substantially increase the probability of an individual to get employed. This evidence suggests at first sight that benefit sanctions are an effective tool in the activation process of the unemployed and should be used more frequently by welfare agencies to enhanc...

“Nudge”-style interventions are typically evaluated on the basis of their effects on behavior, not social welfare. We use a field experiment to measure the welfare effects of one especially policy-relevant intervention, home energy conservation reports. We measure consumer welfare by sending introductory reports and using an incentive-compatible multiple price list to determine willingness-to-p...

We develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms: an individual mandate. We identify a set of key parameters for welfare analysis, allowing us to model the welfare impact of the actual policy as well as to estimate the socially optimal penalty level. Using data from Massachusetts, we estimate the key parameters of the model. We compare health insurance co...