Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/21503 
Year of Publication: 
2002
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 453
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
Social programs
Distributional Effects
Policy Evaluation
JEL: 
H43
I28
D33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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