China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societ...

Determinants of Immigrants’ Cash-Welfare Benefits Intake in Spain Much of the literature on immigrants’ cash-welfare benefits use has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with well established Welfare states. This paper contributes to this literature by analyzing differences in cash-welfare benefits receipt between immigrants and natives and their determinants...

The relationship between labor migration and relative deprivation is examined. "We model migration from one reference group to another as a response to relative deprivation and satisfaction: We say that a strong incentive to migrate exists if relative deprivation decreases while satisfaction rises with migration and that a weak incentive exists if the individual increases or decreases his sat...

A Theory of Employment Guarantees: Contestability, Credibility and Distributional Concerns* This paper develops a theory of employment guarantees when labour markets are imperfect and when the credibility of government policy announcements could be in doubt. The basic feature of an EGS is that any individual who satisfies a set of specified criteria is guaranteed public employment at a given wa...

This paper studies optimal relational contracts in motivating workers in a market setting. We find that labor markets with higher turnover costs will use more subjective performance pay and less efficiency wages and that in those markets, the total wage payment is lower and the equilibrium employment level is higher. Surprisingly, under certain conditions, an increase in turnover costs leads to...