We investigate the dynamic general equilibrium effects of introducing a social assistance program to elderly informal sector workers in developing countries. We find that the extension of such “retirement benefits” in environments with lacking private sector risksharing mechanisms results in welfare increases and relatively minor efficiency losses. Our results suggest that welfare gains attribu...

Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper uses household level data from 1986 to 2000 to examine what determines whether households fall below the poverty line over this period and investiga...

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that entry of new firms reduces not only prices but also costs. However, it is far from clear how this cost-reduction works. In this paper I investigate three models of how entry may cause cost reduction: managerial incentives, survival of the fittest, and imitation. The models have somewhat different implications for social welfare.

* Director, Division of Program Research, Office of the Commissioner. This review and analysis of social welfare expenditures in the United States continues the annual series presented by the Bulletin. Certain changes in the items included and in the grouping of individual items have been made in this year's article, based in part on the advice of a small group of consultants who reviewed the c...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...

Some commentators believe that slotting allowances enhance social welfare by providing retailers with an efficient way to allocate scarce retail shelf space. The claim is that, by offering their shelf space to the highest bidders, retailers act as agents for consumers and ensure that only the most socially desirable products obtain distribution. I show that this claim does not hold in a model i...

Motivated by models of competitive influence spread in networks, we study mechanisms for allocating nodes to self-interested agents with negative externalities. For example, a social network provider may wish to allow advertisers to provide special offers to influential individuals. The advertisers benefit in that product adoption may spread through the network. However, a competing product may...

This paper develops a tractable method for resolving the equity-efficiency tradeoff that modifies the Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to account for the distortionary cost of redistribution. Weighting measures of individual surplus by the inequality deflator corresponds to searching for local Pareto improvements by making transfers through the income tax schedule. Empirical evidence consist...

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...