Seminar: Economics of the welfare state (F)

The seminar gives students the opportunity to work with various aspects of economics of the welfare state, including policy design and evaluation within major welfare state areas, perspectives on fiscal planning, sustainability, and intergenerational fairness in a welfare state, and comparative/cross-country perspectives as well as political economy perspectives on the welfare state and public spending.

Themes might include (but are not limited to):

• Pension systems and policies: e.g. fiscal sustainability and inter- and intragenerational redistribution, retirement and labor supply incentives in the pension system, health and retirement, measures of healthy aging and healthy life expectancy under increasing longevity, design of early retirement schemes, “free-rider” concerns and saving incentives in public pension systems.
• Welfare transfers, e.g. design of welfare transfers, including intensive and extensive margin responses, tagging and screening in transfer design, in-kind transfers.
• Social insurance, e.g. design and effects of disability insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, health care, long-term care, welfare state crowd-out effects on informal insurance, e.g. family support.
• Welfare state labor markets, e.g. effects of active labor market policies, approaches to new types of work arrangements (e.g. platform work), measuring the (dis)value of work attributes (e.g. work environment, sexual harassment, work flexibility), the role of unions, e.g. effects on inequality, policies to promote female labor supply, understanding drivers of gender gaps in labor supply, occupational choice, wages, etc., integration of immigrants into the labor market.
• Measuring the costs and benefits of public spending, e.g. schooling, childcare, healthcare, methods for measuring the willingness to pay for non-traded goods.
• Challenges to the welfare state from globalization, e.g. migration responses to taxes and transfers, design of migration policies, insurance/training policies to deal with adjustment/displacement effects of globalization.
• Political economy perspectives on the welfare state, e.g. what determines the size of the welfare state across countries, understanding voters’ perceptions of and attitudes towards public spending and taxes, corruption in welfare state countries, social trust in welfare states, trust in politicians and public institutions, political effects of economic policy.