 Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government PreferencesEconomics Working Paper Archive from The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics Abstract: Work requirements in means-tested transfer programs have grown in importance in the U.S. and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximized. Here we consider a case where society is paternalistic and instead has preferences over the actual work allocations of welfare recipients. With this social welfare function, optimality of work requirements is possible but depends on the accuracy of the screening mechanism which assigns work requirements to some benefit recipients and not others. Numerical simulations show that the accuracy must be high for such optimality to occur. The simulations also show that earnings subsidies can be justified with the type of social welfare function used here. Date: 2005-06, Revised 2006-06 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jhu:papers:534 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economics Working Paper Archive from The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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