Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies

Pedro Carneiro, Karsten T. Hansen and James Heckman

No 8840, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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.

JEL-codes: D33 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-03
Note: CH LS PE ED
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (58)

Published as Carneiro, Pedro, Karsten T. Hansen, and James J. Heckman. "Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies." Swedish Economic Policy Review 8, 2 (Fall 2001): 273-301.

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Working Paper: Removing the veil of ignorance in assessing the distributional impacts of social policies (2002)
Working Paper: Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies (2002)
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