Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/82195 
Year of Publication: 
2002
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2002:2
Publisher: 
Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU), Uppsala
Abstract: 
This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine how those policies shift persons across the distributions of potential outcomes produced by them. Our approach enables analysts to evaluate the distributional effects of social programs without invoking the Veil of Ignorance assumption often used in the literature in applied welfare economics. Our methods determine which persons are affected by a given policy, where they come from in the ex-ante outcome distribution and what their gains are. We apply our methods to analyze two proposed policy reforms in American education. These reforms benefit the middle class and not the poor.
Subjects: 
social programs
welfare economics
JEL: 
I28
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
382.82 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.