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Title: Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Carneiro, Pedro M.
Hansen, Karsten T.
Heckman, James J.
Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies
IZA Discussion Paper No. 453, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), March 2002.
Also: ftp://ftp.iza.org/dps/dp453.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Educational Returns; Modeling; Welfare

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

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.
Bibliography Citation
Carneiro, Pedro M., Karsten T. Hansen and James J. Heckman. "Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies." IZA Discussion Paper No. 453, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), March 2002.