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1. Childhood Welfare Exposure and Economic Outcomes for Adult Daughters and Sons

Author:
Robert Paul Hartley, Carlos Lamarche, and James P. Ziliak
Publication Date:
01-2025
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We investigate how length of time on welfare during childhood affects economic outcomes in early adulthood. Using intergenerationally linked mother-child pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we adopt a nonlinear difference-in-differences framework using the 1990s welfare reform to estimate average and quantile treatment effects on intensity of welfare use and earnings in adulthood. The causal estimates indicate that additional childhood welfare exposure leads to more adulthood years on the broader safety net for both daughters and sons, yet this positive relationship only applies below moderate levels of adult welfare participation and reverses at greater levels of dependence. Increasing childhood welfare exposure implies lower earnings in adulthood for daughters, however we find no evidence that it depresses adult sons’ earnings. Both daughters and sons exhibit some wage penalty from childhood welfare exposure, yet only daughters are penalized through hours worked in the labor market.
Topic:
Economics, Income Inequality, Welfare, Labor Market, Gender, and Intergenerational
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-Run Perspective

Author:
K.A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl, and F. Mueller
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares in stock and new construction since the first housing laws around 1900. The interpolated benchmark time series generally describe the rise and fall of social housing across a residual, a socialist, and a Northern-European housing group. The decline was steeper than for the classical welfare state, but the degree of erosion was surprisingly small in some countries where public housing associations remained resilient. Within the broader housing welfare state, social housing correlates positively with rent regulation and allowances, but negatively with homeownership subsidies and liberal mortgage regulation. A multivariate analysis shows that social housing is rather explained by housing shortages and complementarities with rental and welfare policies than by typical welfare state theories (GDP, political parties). Generally, the paper shows that conventional housing typologies are difficult to defend over time and argues more generally for including housing decommodification in welfare state research.
Topic:
Welfare, Public Health, Housing, and Social Order
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Private Insurance, Public Welfare, and Financial Markets: Alpine and Maritime Countries in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Author:
A. van der Heide and S. Kohl
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
Contemporary capitalist societies use different institutions to manage economic risks. While different public welfare state and financial institutions (banks, capital markets) have been studied across coordinated and liberal market economies, this paper adds the private insurance sector to the study of countries’ security arrangements, following up on Michel Albert’s classical distinction between Alpine and Maritime insurance cultures. Building on extensive new insurance data collections (1880–2017) and institutional analysis, this paper corroborates the long-run historical existence of two worlds of private insurance. Maritime countries (USA, GBR, CAN) developed much bigger life and non-life insurance earlier, with no state-associated insurance enterprises and riskier investments steered towards financial markets. Alpine insurance (AUT, DEU, CHE), by contrast, was initially smaller, with strong state involvement, a significant reinsurance tradition and relatively heavy investments in mortgages and property, due to economic and financial backwardness. We argue that the larger and more “Maritime” the insurance sector, the more it made welfare states liberal and securities markets large. Insurance is thus a hidden factor for countries’ varieties of capitalism and world of welfare. The recent convergence on the Maritime model, however, implies that the riskier and risk-individualizing type of private insurance has added to privatization and securitization trends everywhere.
Topic:
Development, Capitalism, Finance, and Welfare
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. Gender preference at birth: A new measure for son preference based on stated preferences and observed measures of parents’ fertility decisions

Author:
Mehwish Ali, Ashton de Silva, Sarah Sinclair, and Ankita Mishra
Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Investigating preference for sons is a continuing focal area of development economics and demographic research. Son preference presents a challenge in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ‘no poverty’, ‘good health and wellbeing’, and ‘gender equality’ by 2030. It is thus important to investigate son preference to inform policy-makers of the potential challenges in achieving these goals. Inaccurate interpretation of the mechanisms of son preference could misinform policy analysis and result in unintended consequences. Existing measures including sex ratios and gender composition of children do not reflect the true extent of son preference in high fertility countries such as Pakistan, where the success of policy action is limited and significant barriers to sex-selective technologies exist. Given the likely impact of son preference on fertility behaviour in Pakistan, accurate measurement of the forms this gender bias can take is necessary to appropriately gauge the influence of son preference on the fertility outcomes. The limited capacity of existing measures to accurately depict son preference in countries with high fertility combined with limited demarcation between pre- and post-birth son preference warrants development of a new measure for son preference to evaluate its effects. In this paper, a new measure of son preference called ‘gender preferences at birth’ (GPB) is presented. GPB combines stated fertility preferences and observed fertility outcomes to acknowledge that households in countries with high fertility and low contraception usage have less control over their fertility decisions.
Topic:
Economics, Sustainable Development Goals, Welfare, Family Planning, Fertility, and Gender
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, and Global Focus

5. No Strings Attached: Corporate Welfare, State Intervention, and the Issue of Conditionality

Author:
Fabio Bulfone, Timur Ergen, and Manolis Kalaitzake
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE), developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare — the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality — is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, with- out a well-developed concept of corporate welfare – premised upon the key criterion of conditionality – studies that identify a “return” of the state in industrial planning misrepre- sent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for em- pirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.
Topic:
Industrial Policy, Political Economy, Privatization, Monetary Policy, Welfare, and Public-Private Partnership
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Private Insurance, Public Welfare, and Financial Markets: Alpine and Maritime Countries in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Author:
Arjen van der Heide and Sebastian Kohl
Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo)
Abstract:
Contemporary capitalist societies use different institutions to manage economic risks. While different public welfare state and financial institutions (banks, capital markets) have been studied across coordinated and liberal market economies, this paper adds the private insurance sector to the study of countries’ security arrangements, following up on Michel Albert’s classical distinction between Alpine and Maritime insurance cultures. Building on extensive new insurance data collections (1880–2017) and institutional analysis, this paper corroborates the long-run historical existence of two worlds of private insurance. Maritime countries (USA, GBR, CAN) developed much bigger life and non-life insurance earlier, with no state-associated insurance enterprises and riskier investments steered towards financial markets. Alpine insurance (AUT, DEU, CHE), by contrast, was initially smaller, with strong state involvement, a significant reinsurance tradition and relatively heavy investments in mortgages and property, due to economic and financial backwardness. We argue that the larger and more “Maritime” the insurance sector, the more it made welfare states liberal and securities markets large. Insurance is thus a hidden factor for countries’ varieties of capitalism and world of welfare. The recent convergence on the Maritime model, however, implies that the riskier and risk-individualizing type of private insurance has added to privatization and securitization trends everywhere.
Topic:
History, Capitalism, Welfare, Insurance, and Financial Development
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. Some Unpleasant ODA Arithmetic

Author:
Ranil Dissanayake and Atousa Tahmasebi
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Official development assistance is supposed to be designed to prioritise the economic development and welfare of developing countries. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee is a club of wealthy donor countries which collaborate to set rules and norms to this effect. However, digging into the official data submitted by donors to the OECD reveals some unpleasant truths. We use data on every funding line reported by donors to the OECD between 2006 and 2019 to investigate the pattern and distribution of commitments and disbursements of ODA to developing countries, and discover that ODA is targeted poorly within the group of eligible developing countries; that this group of eligible countries is gradually expanding to include more relatively wealthy places; that aggregate ODA flows are organized and structured sub-optimally; and that ODA responds more to arbitrary income classifications than it should. We suggest informational and incentive reforms in response. These findings also suggest limits to what realistic reform of ODA can achieve, and, consequently, the importance of non-aid development policy for outcomes in developing countries.
Topic:
Development, International Cooperation, Foreign Aid, and Welfare
Political Geography:
Global Focus

8. Fiscal Policy as Credit Policy: Reassessing the Fiscal Spending vs. Private Debt Trade-Off

Author:
Etienne Lepers
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
City Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC), University of London
Abstract:
This paper revisits the dominant narrative that explains the substantial household credit boom as a substitute to fiscal redistribution, i.e. the “substitution” hypothesis, according to which fiscally-constrained governments substituted public safety nets by private credit. I argue instead that the credit and welfare state constituencies may not necessarily be the same and that far from fiscally constrained, governments have been actively using “fiscal policy as credit policy”. I provide two sets of empirical evidence for such account: First, I find a positive within-country relationship between household debt and fiscal spending. Second, compiling a unique dataset of 550 fiscal subsidies adjustments in 50 countries since 1980, I show that fiscal and tax subsidies have been instrumental in driving household credit. These dynamics have distributional and financial stability implications as such tax subsidies typically favour higher income households and household debt booms have proven more dangerous than corporate ones.
Topic:
Debt, Financial Crisis, Welfare, Financialisation, Subsidies, Household, and Public Finance
Political Geography:
Global Focus

9. El problema del coste de la defensa

Author:
Carlos Marti Sempere
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal on International Security Studies (RESI)
Institution:
International Security Studies Group (GESI) at the University of Granada
Abstract:
Este artículo aborda la cuestión del coste asociado ala defensa, es decir, de los recursos que la sociedad debe dedicar a proporcionar seguridad a sus miembros. En él se examina los métodos y formas de establecer y distribuir estos recursos para obtener un conjunto apropiado de capacidades militares que soporten la percepción de seguridad del ciudadano, resolviendo así el problema de la defensa y aumentando así el bienestar económico y social. Se trata de una cuestión antigua que hasido objeto de una preocupación constante del ser humano.La novedad más importante de este artículo es examina resta cuestión desde la perspectiva de la racionalidad limitada del ser humano, dela información imperfecta de la que dispone, de la existencia de preferencias sin una clara racionalidad económica y de instituciones y normas deeficacia limitada. Todo ello conducea asignaciones de recursos para la defensa que pueden encontrarse lejos delos valores que ofrecen un bienestar general mayor.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Economics, Markets, Welfare, and Efficiency
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. The Role of Values for Social Cohesion: Theoretical Explication and Empirical Exploration

Author:
Daniel Nowack and Sophia Schoderer
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
Abstract:
Shared values are deemed necessary as a solid foundation for social cohesion by commentators and observers in many countries. However, when examining what kind of values this is based on, answers often come down to platitudes and national clichés. This discussion paper offers some clarification through both a theoretical explication and an empirical exploration concerning the general role of values for social cohesion. Values are notions about desirable, trans-situational end-states and behaviours. They fall into two categories, individual and societal values. We provide a critical discussion of the most prominent conceptualisations and their operationalisation in the social sciences. Values affect social cohesion in three possible pathways: First, when they are shared; second, when they promote behaviour per se conducive to social cohesion and third, through their effect on policy choice and institutional design. We review evidence provided by the research literature for each of these pathways. We further explore the third pathway by deriving from the research literature the conjecture that a cultural value emphasis on egalitarianism makes a universalistic scope of welfare institutions more likely, which in turn increases social and political trust. We first examine this conjecture with a series of regression models, and then run a mediation analysis. The results show that (1.) egalitarian values are moderately strongly and positively linked to universalistic welfare institutions, but that (2.) welfare institutions mediate the association of egalitarian values with social trust only to a small extent and that (3.) more universalistic welfare institutions counteract a negative association between egalitarian values and institutional trust.
Topic:
Culture, Institutions, Values, Welfare, and Social Cohesion
Political Geography:
Germany and Global Focus