Two decades of federal and state demonstration projects and experiments with cash welfare in the United States culminated with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). PRWORA, aka welfare reform, is widely viewed as the most fundamental reform to the U.S. social safety net since the New Deal by its dismantling of the major cash entitle...

New technology in knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) make it possible to extract valuable information from operational data. Private businesses already use the technology for better management, planning, and marketing. Social welfare government agencies have a wealth of information about the experiences of families and individuals that are the most needy in our society in their administr...

Animal-welfare issues are usually portrayed in the media in a black-and-white fashion, with simple, single-perspective solutions proposed for what are often, in fact, complex policy issues. In this article, we argue that animal welfare is a multifaceted international and domestic public-policy issue that must take account of not only scientific, ethical, and economic issues but also religious, ...

Welfare and food stamp program changes may affect local economies, and economic changes may affect local program participation. In this paper we outline a model of these interactions. First we highlight key changes in the programs and report recent program and labor market participation patterns in metro and non-metro portions of the Midwest and the state of Iowa. Then we describe computable ge...

Since the 1990s spectrum auctions have been implemented world-wide. This has provided for a practical examination of an assortment of auction mechanisms and, amongst these, two simultaneous ascending price auctions have proved to be extremely successful. These are the simultaneous multiround ascending auction (SMRA) and the combinatorial clock auction (CCA). It has long been known that, for cer...

The dissolution of the old mechanisms of state welfare has not yet led to the generation of a new welfare settlement, although the rise of neoliberalism and of what Jessop has called the Schumpeterian Competition State have highlighted some key directions of change. The importance of geographical inequality and unevenness to the process of reshaping welfare has been widely recognised, and the f...

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...

Energy conservation and greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement have been included in the national development strategy of China, however, the rigidity in command-and-control, absence of market-mechanism and arbitrariness in assignment of abatement burden across regions have caused unnecessary losses in both economic efficiency and social equity. In this paper, we established an Inter-Regional CGE model...

over all feasible outcomes (x1, . . . , xn) in some set X. Revenue is generated in welfaremaximizing auctions, but only as a side effect, a necessary evil to incentivize participants to report their private information. This lecture begins our discussion of auctions that are explicitly designed to raise as much revenue as possible. We started with the welfare objective for several reasons. One ...

For the changes under welfare reform to positively affect children, the gains that mothers make from employment must lead to improvements in children's daily settings at home, in child care, at school, or in the community. This article focuses on the role child care can play in promoting the development of, and life opportunities for, low-income children. Key observations include: Total federal...