CASEreport

CASE Annual Report 2022

We are delighted to share with you our annual report for 2022 which this year is a bumper edition. In September we celebrated our 25th birthday with a special event to mark the occasion and this year’s annual report is ...Read more...

Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Paper

Public and private welfare activity in England, 1979 to 2019.

Mary Reader and Tania Burchardt

This paper offers an empirical account of the changing landscape of private and public welfare activity in England over the forty years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. It forms a part of the Social Policies and Distribut...Read more...

CASEpaper

The two-child limit & ‘choices’ over family size: When policy presentation collides with lived experiences

Kate Andersen and Ruth Patrick

The two-child limit restricts the child element in Universal Credit and Tax Credits to two children in a household (for children born after April 2017). One objective of the two-child limit is to influence the fertility ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Did the introduction of the benefit cap in Britain harm mental health? A natural experiment approach

Aaron Reeves, Mark Fransham, Kitty Stewart and Ruth Patrick

In November 2016, the UK government announced they would be lowering the benefit cap, the total amount a family with no-one in full-time employment can receive from the government in social security. This policy change r...Read more...

SPDO Research Note

The post war welfare state: stages and disputes

Howard Glennerster

It has been suggested that the COVID epidemic, and its profound economic and social consequences, may produce major changes in the dominant ideas that help set the boundaries to social action. This note reflects on sig...Read more...

SPDO Research Note

Does COVID-19 represent a 'new Beveridge' moment, a crisis that will wash away, or a call to action?

Tania Burchardt

Report of a roundtable discussion on theories of welfare...Read more...

Journal Article

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice:

Universal simplicity? The alleged simplicity of Universal Credit from administrative and claimant perspectives

Kate Summers and David Young

A key aim of Universal Credit is to simplify the social security system. While several aspects of its introduction have received critical attention, this overarching aim continues to receive acceptance and support. Drawi...Read more...

CASEpaper

Measuring individual well-being: A multidimensional index integrating subjective well-being and preferences

Lin Yang

Policymakers have begun looking for measures to assess the well-being of their citizens beyond GDP per capita and disposable income levels. However, the multidimensional and subjective nature of human well-being makes de...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Welfare and Inequality Comparisons for Uni- and Multi-dimensional Distributions of Ordinal Data

Frank A Cowell, Martyna Kobus and Radoslaw Kurek

Decision makers and social planners are often faced with a problem of evaluating distributions of ordinal variables i.e. variables for which there are no numbers but only the ordering, such as, for example, self-reported...Read more...

CASEreport

Changing Rules and Spending Cuts: Helping tenants help themselves and their landlords. Report from two Tenant Think Tanks

Alice Belotti

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CASEpaper

Public and Private Welfare Activity in England

Polina Obolenskaya and Tania Burchardt

This paper is the latest in a series of publications documenting the shifting boundaries of private and public welfare activity for the years 1979/80, 1995/96, 1999/00 and 2007/08, and now 2013/14. It records who finance...Read more...

Book

Social Policy in a Cold Climate: policies and their consequences since the crisis

Edited by Ruth Lupton, Tania Burchardt, John Hills, Kitty Stewart and Polly Vizard

A new book published by Policy Press offers a data-rich, evidence-based analysis of the impact government policies from 2007/08 to 2015 have had on inequality and on the delivery of services such as health, education...Read more...

CASEpaper

A fresh look at an old question: is pro-poor targeting of cash transfers more effective than universal systems at reducing inequality and poverty?

Abigail McKnight

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

European Identity and Redistributive Preferences

Joan Costa-Font and Frank A Cowell

How important is spatial identity in shifting preferences for redistribution? This paper takes advantage of within-country variability in the adoption of a single currency as an instrument to examine the impact of the re...Read more...

CASEreport

Is Welfare Reform Working? Impacts on working age tenants

Eileen Herden, Anne Power and Bert Provan

This report presents evidence on whether the aim of moving people who are dependent on benefits into work has been achieved, and considers three important questions: Are welfare reforms encouraging tenants into work or t...Read more...

CASEpaper

Climate Change and Sustainable Welfare: An Argument for the Centrality of Human Needs

Ian Gough

Since climate change threatens human wellbeing across the globe and into the future, we require a concept of wellbeing that encompasses an equivalent ambit. This paper argues that only a concept of human need can do the ...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Family Welfare Cultures

Gordon B. Dahl, Magne Mogstad and Andreas Ravndal Kostol

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long- standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a ...Read more...

SPCC Research Note

Re-visiting the conceptual framework for public/private boundaries in welfare

Tania Burchardt

Under the Conservative administration 1979-1997, there was considerable debate about the boundaries of the welfare state: what should be provided by the state, what could or should be provided through the market, what mi...Read more...

SPCC Research Note

Social Policy in a Cold Climate: A Framework for Analysing the Effects of Social Policy

Ruth Lupton, Tania Burchardt, John Hills, Kitty Stewart and Polly Vizard

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/8, social policy and the welfare state in the UK have been undergoing a period of extraordinary change. After a decade of welfare state expansion to 2007, with part...Read more...

CASEbrief

Equal access to high quality early education and care? Evidence from England and lessons from other countries

Ludovica Gambaro, Kitty Stewart and Jane Waldfogel

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CASEpaper

The Shifting Balance of Private and Public Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 2007

Daniel Edmiston

The balance between private and public sectors in welfare activity in the UK has been documented by Burchardt (1997) and Smithies (2005) for three time periods; 1979/1980, 1995/1996 and 1999/2000. The existing evidence s...Read more...

CASEpaper

Estimates of the asset-effect: The search for a causal effect of assets on adult health and employment outcomes

Abigail McKnight

In this paper we seek to determine the effect of assets held in early adult life on later outcomes. We specifically look at wages, employment prospects, general health and Malaise. The identification of an asset-effect t...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

The Tyranny Puzzle in Welfare Economics: An empirical investigation

Frank A Cowell, Marc Fleurbaey and Bertil Tungodden

We address a puzzle in welfare economics – the possibility that rational people may be simultaneously against two apparently con‡icting forms of “tyranny.” In fact the two types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the po...Read more...

DARP Paper

Catastrophic Health Expenditure and Household Well-Being

Ramses H. Abul Naga and Karine Lamiraud

According to the catastrophic health expenditure methodology a household is in catastrophe if its health out-of-pocket budget share exceeds a critical threshold. We develop a conceptual framework for addressing three que...Read more...

CASEpaper

The Impact of Policy Change on Job Retention and Advancement

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight

This paper examines the impact of the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on employment retention and advancement. The WFTC, which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, supplemented earnings of low paid workers living i...Read more...

CASEpaper

Welfare Reform in the United States: Implications for British Social Policy (with commentaries by Kitty Stewart, David Piachaud and Howard Glennerster)

James Midgley

Recent government pronouncements in the UK and above all the recent Conservative Party (2008) policy document on welfare reform suggest that US welfare reform is increasingly being taken as a model for the UK. What lesso...Read more...

DARP Paper

Distributional Orderings: An Approach with Seven Flavours

Wulf Gaertner, Frank A Cowell and Yoram Amiel

We examine individuals' distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavours” or interpretations of the basic d...Read more...

CASEpaper

Welfare Reforms and Child Well-Being in the US and UK

Jane Waldfogel

This paper examines the effects of recent welfare reforms in the US and UK on the well-being of children in low-income families, looking specifically at the effects on poverty, family expenditures, and child health and d...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Active Courts and Menu Contracts

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). An active court can improve on the outcome that t...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

SHOULD COURTS ALWAYS ENFORCE WHAT CONTRACTING PARTIES WRITE? This paper replaces TE/2003/464

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality: Measurement

Frank A Cowell

This article provides a brief overview of the key issues in inequality measurement and has been prepared for inclusion in the second edition of The New Palgrave....Read more...

DARP Paper

To Be or not To Be Involved: A Questionnaire-Experimental View on Harsanyi’s Utilitarian Ethics

Yoram Amiel, Frank A Cowell and Wulf Gaertner

According to standard theory founded on Harsanyi (1953, 1955) a social welfare function can be appropriately based on the individual’s approach to choice under uncertainty. We investigate whether people really do rank di...Read more...

CASEpaper

Exploring the effects of integrated benefit systems and active labour market policies: Evidence from Jobcentre Plus in the UK

Eleni Karagiannaki

In April 2002 Jobcentre Plus started to operate in the UK bringing together the service of the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service. Offering a fully integrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking servi...Read more...

CASEpaper

Expenditure Patterns Post-Welfare Reform in the UK: Are low-income families starting to catch up?

Paul Gregg, Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook

In this paper we provide evidence on how the UK government’s welfare reforms since 1998 have affected the material well-being of children in low-income families. We examine changes in expenditure patterns and ownership o...Read more...

CASEpaper

Jobcentre Plus or Minus? Exploring the performance of Jobcentre Plus for non-jobseekers

Eleni Karagiannaki

Since April 2002 Jobcentre Plus has started to operate nationwide in the UK providing fully integrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking activities for people of working age. This new organisation put an ex...Read more...

CASEpaper

Public and Private Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999

Rachel Smithies

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors – education, health, personal social services, housing, an...Read more...

CASEpaper

Helter Skelter: Families, disabled children and the benefit system

Gabrielle Preston

Families with disabled children are susceptible to poverty because low income is compounded by high costs. Combing caring with employment is extremely difficult, so families are heavily reliant upon benefits. But do disa...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Should Courts Always Enforce What Contracting Parties Write? This paper is replaced by TE/2006/510

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Andrew Postlewaite

We find an economic rationale for the common-sense answer to the question in our title ¿ courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyse a contractual environment that allows ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Preference Reversals and the Analysis of Income Distributions

Yoram Amiel, Frank A Cowell, Leima Davidovitz and Avraham Polovin

It is known from the literature on uncertainty that in cases where individuals express a preference for a high win-probability bet over a bet with high winnings they nevertheless will bid more to obtain the bet with high...Read more...

CASEpaper

Changing Poverty Post-1997

David Piachaud and Holly Sutherland

The paper analyses changes in poverty in Britain since 1997. A poverty level of 60 percent of median equivalised income is used. The first part examines the changes that occurred between 1996/7 and 2000/1 as shown by the...Read more...

CASEpaper

Recent Changes in the Distribution of the Social Wage

Tom Sefton

This paper examines the distribution of the ¿social wage¿ benefits in kind from welfare services, including the National Health Service, state education, social housing, and personal social services. The current Governme...Read more...

CASEpaper

Welfare Reform and Lone Mothers' Employment in the US

Jane Waldfogel, Sandra K. Danziger, Sheldon Danziger and Kristin Seefeldt

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 represents a dramatic change in the US welfare state. One of its key goals was to move lone mothers, even those with young children, fr...Read more...

DARP Paper

Robust Lorenz Curves: A Semiparametric Approach, (published in Journal of Economic Inequality, vol. 5 (2007), pp. 21-37)

Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using p...Read more...

CASEreport

Welfare to Work and the Organisation of Opportunity: Lessons from Abroad

Martin Evans

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DARP Paper

A Note on the Estimation of Intergenerational Income Correlations by the Method of Averaging

Ramses H. Abul Naga

Averaging methods are routinely used in order to limit biases resulting from the mismeasurement of permanent incomes. The Solon/Zimmerman estimator regresses a single-year measurement of the child's resources on a T-peri...Read more...

CASEpaper

Getting Less for More: Economic Evaluation in the Social Welfare Field

Tom Sefton

Economic evaluation has an important role in helping to make decisions about the use of scarce resources in an explicit and rational manner, yet economic evaluation is not well-developed in many areas of social welfare. ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Estimating Welfare Indices: Household Weights and Sample Design, (published in Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 9 (2002), pp. 147-172).

Frank A Cowell and Stephen P Jenkins

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic...Read more...

CASEpaper

How Effective is the British Government's Attempt to Reduce Child Poverty?

David Piachaud and Holly Sutherland

The new Labour Government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. This paper describes the specific initiatives involved in Labour's approach and weighs them up in terms of their...Read more...

CASEpaper

Low Inequality with Low Redistribution? An analysis of income distribution in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan compared to Britain

Didier Jacobs

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequality in four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures by population g...Read more...

CASEpaper

The Evolution of Disability Benefits in the UK: Re-weighting the basket

Tania Burchardt

This paper attempts to clarify the significance of reforms to disability benefits proposed by the New Labour government in 1998, by setting them in the context of the development of disability benefits in the early 1970s...Read more...

CASEpaper

Partnership in Pensions? Responses to the Pensions Green Paper

Phil Agulnik, Nicholas Barr, Jane Falkingham and Katherine Rake

The government's pensions Green Paper 'a new contract for welfare: partnership in pensions' proposes fundamental changes to the UK's retirement income system. Members of CASE and the Department of Social Policy at LSE ha...Read more...

CASEpaper

Welfare in Transition: Trends in Poverty and Well-being in Central Asia

Jane Falkingham

This paper examines the impact of the transition on living standards and welfare in the five Republics of former Soviet Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, along with the Republ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Thatcherism, New Labour and the Welfare State (chapter in 'New Labour: A turning point in British Politics', H Kastgendiek and R Stimshoff (eds), Philo, 1999)

John Hills

This paper examines the extent to which the policies towards the welfare state pursued by the Labour Government in its first fifteen months represent a break with those of its Conservative predecessor and with earlier po...Read more...

DARP Paper

Measurement of Inequality (published in Handbook of Income Distribution, A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon (eds), 2000)

Frank A Cowell

The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics. Prepated for Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon....Read more...

DARP Paper

Happiness in Transition: The Case of Kyrgyzstan

Ceema Zahra Namazie and Peter Sanfey

We analyse self-reported measures of satisfaction with life in a transition country, Kyrgyzstan, using 1993 household survey data. We test whether higher levels of satisfaction are associated with greater economic well-b...Read more...

CASEpaper

Social Welfare Systems in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis including Private Welfare

Didier Jacobs

This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five East Asian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as income distribution aspects,...Read more...

DARP Paper

The Subjective Approach to the Measurement of Income Inequality (published in Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement, J Silber (ed), Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999), pp.227-241)

Yoram Amiel

Inequality measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. I...Read more...

DARP Paper

Linear Inequality Concepts and Social Welfare

Udo Ebert

The paper presents an abstract definition of linear inequality concepts leading to linearly invariant inequality measures and characterizes the class of linear concepts completely. Two general methods of deriving ethical...Read more...

CASEpaper

Boundaries between Public and Private Welfare: a typology and map of services (publ.as Private Welfare and Public Policy, Burchardt, Hills and Propper, Rowntree Foundation, Jan 1999)

Tania Burchardt

This paper develops a typology of welfare services and attempts to illustrate its use in clarifying discussions about the privatisation of welfare and in analysing changes in expenditure. A third dimension, which concern...Read more...

DARP Paper

On the Performance of Social Benefit Systems

Christian Schluter

The paper analyses the performance of unemployment benefit systems in a search-theoretic framework. The criteria of evaluation comprise the alleviation of poverty and the reduction in income inequality, whilst the divers...Read more...

DARP Paper

Equivalence of Scales and Inequality (published in Income Inequality Measurement: From Theory to Practice, J Silber (ed), Dewenter: Kluwer (1999)

Frank A Cowell and Magda Mercader-Prats

Instead of Inequality analysis sometimes neglects the problem of allowing differences in people's non-income characteristics in the comparison of income distribution, I would say, At the heart of any distributional analy...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality, Welfare and Monotonicity

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We establish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the ?reduced-form? version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relatio...Read more...

DARP Paper

Growing Apart: Inequality and Poverty Trends in Brazil in the 1980s

Francisco H.G. Ferreira and Julie Litchfield

This paper analyses the evolution of inequality and poverty in Brazil during the 1980s, using a large repeated cross-section household survey data set. We calculate standard scalar measures of inequality and poverty, tog...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Optimal Patent Renewals

Francesca Cornelli and Mark Schankerman

When firms have different R&D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across inventions. The reason is that the uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do R&D to the low pr...Read more...

DARP Paper

Welfare Judgements in the Presence Contaminated Data, (published in Econometrica, vol. 70 (2002), pp. 1221-1233)

Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can...Read more...

DARP Paper

Mixed dominance: a new criterion for poverty analysis

Stephen Howes

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the secon...Read more...