IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/upf/upfgen/544.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income maintenance programs and multidimensional screening

Author

Listed:
  • Joel Shapiro

Abstract

This paper examines properties of optimal poverty assistance programs under different informational environments using an income maintenance framework. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting benefit schedules with those of programs found in the United States since Welfare Reform (1996). We find that optimal programs closely resemble a Negative Income Tax with a Benefit Reduction rate that depends on the distribution of population characteristics. A policy of workfare (unpaid public sector work) is inefficient when disutility of labor is unobservable, but minimum work requirements (for paid work) may be used in that same environment. The distortions to work incentives and the presence of minimum work requirements depend on the observability and relative importance of the population's characteristics.

Suggested Citation

  • Joel Shapiro, 2001. "Income maintenance programs and multidimensional screening," Economics Working Papers 544, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
  • Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:544
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/544.pdf
    File Function: Whole Paper
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. De Donder, Philippe & Hindriks, Jean, 2003. "Policy-Oriented Parties and the Choice between Social and Private Insurance," IDEI Working Papers 226, Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse.
    2. De Donder, Philippe & Hindriks, Jean, 2007. "Equilibrium social insurance with policy-motivated parties," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 624-640, September.
    3. Brett, Craig & Weymark, John A., 2003. "Financing education using optimal redistributive taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(11), pages 2549-2569, October.
    4. Josepa Miquel-Florensa, 2010. "“Tell me what you need”: signaling with limited resources," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 99(1), pages 1-28, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Welfare programs; optimal taxation; multidimensional screening;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:544. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.econ.upf.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.