Housing Subsidies and Work Incentives

Low-income housing assistance is part of the welfare state of all developed countries. The rest of the welfare state may cause work disincentives. In theory, housing assistance may also do so, but those disincentives may be blunted by its in-kind character and the way it is rationed. Rationing and selection make the estimation difficult; the most rigorous evidence from the United States suggests a loss of 10 to 20 cents in earnings per dollar of assistance. Less rigorous evidence from Australia suggests negative impacts in public housing but not housing benefit, while in Scandinavia researchers have as yet found no long-term duration of dependency.Housing Subsidies, Housing Assistance, Work Disincentives, Rationing, Selection, Comparative International

Housing Subsidies and Work Incentives

Low-income housing assistance is part of the welfare state of all developed countries. The rest of the welfare state may cause work disincentives. In theory, housing assistance may also do so, but those disincentives may be blunted by its in-kind character and the way it is rationed. Rationing and selection make the estimation difficult; the most rigorous evidence from the United States suggests a loss of 10 to 20 cents in earnings per dollar of assistance. Less rigorous evidence from Australia suggests negative impacts in public housing but not housing benefit, while in Scandinavia researchers have as yet found no long-term duration of dependency

Rental Housing Assistance for the 21st Century

Current rental housing assistance programs are not designed to provide a safety net for people whose lives are volatile, or to encourage poor people to live in good locations. These failings can be corrected. HUD should establish a program of rental insurance-like mortgage insurance, but for renters. Low income housing assistance formulas should be revised to reward good neighborhood features, and punish bad

A principal-agent model of altruistic redistribution, with some implications for fiscal federalism

Principal-agent, Fiscal federalism, Welfare systems, Information, Incomplete information, Altruism, Deserving poor, I30, D64, D82, H7,

Games the States Don't Play: Welfare Benefits and the Theory of Fiscal Federalism.

Fiscal federalism theory predicts that states will behave strategically in welfare programs because voter demand for welfare is sensitive to tax price, while the tax price itself changes because of welfare-induced migration. This paper tests these propositions on AFDC in the United States for a panel from 1982-88 using new models for the determination of the recipiency ratio (the tax price) and composite neighbors. The data do not support any substantial tax price elasticity of demand for welfare. Estimates of migration effects on tax price are found to be sensitive to specification. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The Social Experiment Market

In social experiments, individuals, households, or organizations are randomly assigned to two or more policy interventions. Elsewhere, we have summarized 143 experiments completed by autumn 1996. Here, we use the information we have gathered on these experiments and findings from informal telephone interviews to investigate the social experiment market--the buyers and sellers in the market that governs the production of experiments. We discuss target populations, types of interventions tested, trends in design, funding sources, industry concentration, the role of economists in social experimentation, the reasons few social experiments have been conducted outside the United States, and the future of the social experiment market.