published in: Swedish Policy Review, 2001, 8 (2), 273-301
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.
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