This paper analyses social policy reform in the past 30 years in Spain from a novel point of view, namely, that of the institutional capabilities of Bismarckian welfare states to reinvent themselves and to successfully adapt to an era of austerity and open economic competition. After a brief introduction aiming at signaling the main characteristics of Spain from the political and economic point...

abstract the objective of this study is evaluation of government’s optimum combination of policy instruments on per capita consumption of bread and the share of this product in food cost of families in different income classes. the minimization of changes in dead weight loss function is used in this study. by using boot strop method and on base of normal distribution for supply elasticity and d...

In an era of ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001) and financial crisis, the issue of financing welfare state provisions is topical. Moreover, the future of welfare state funding in countries with ageing populations is no doubt raising increasing interest in scholarly as well as policy circles. Yet the financing side of welfare provision has traditionally been given little attention and remains...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences are used as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of sanctions on the drop-out from welfare an...

Many empirical studies find robust evidence that marginal cost of production directly depends on the nominal rate of interest. This relationship induces a cost channel for monetary policy transmission. Although the empirical literature provides ample evidence for a cost channel, studies that evaluate the welfare gains from monetary policy commitment have so far entirely ignored its presence. Th...

The paper considers two countries each populated by workers and capitalists and equipped with a government that collects taxes to nance productive expenditure and income redistribution. The share of income redistributed de nes the size of the welfare state. Both groups in each country bene t from an abolition of the welfare state in the long run. Nevertheless, the optimal scal policy in autarky...

This article discusses the regulation of marriage migration to Norway through an analysis of the subsistence requirement rule which entails that a person who wants to bring a spouse to Norway must achieve a certain level of income. Policy-makers present two main arguments for this regulation. First, the subsistence requirement is a means to prevent forced marriage. Second, its aim is to prevent...

Previous studies on fiscal policy at the zero bound have focused on models with perfect foresight. However, the recent economic environment motivating such research is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. This paper studies optimal government spending and monetary policy when the nominal interest rate is subject to the zero lower bound constraint in a stochastic environment. In the pr...