CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 572Economic and Fiscal StudiesPolitics, Economics, and Education PolicySocial Policy and Reform Studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 161 of the 164 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A unified welfare analysis of government policies.

Open access
Hendren, Nathaniel, Sprung-Keyser, Ben·2020·The Quarterly Journal of Economics
DOI 10.1093/qje/qjaa006
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to calculate the benefit that each policy provides its recipients (measured as their willingness to pay) and the policy’s net cost, inclusive of long-term effects on the government’s budget. We divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, or its ``MVPF''. Comparing MVPFs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their effect on social welfare. Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education have historically had the highest MVPFs, on average exceeding 5. Many such policies have paid for themselves as the government recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers. We find large MVPFs for education and health policies among children of all ages, rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood. We find smaller MVPFs for policies targeting adults, generally between 0.5 and 2. Expenditures on adults have exceeded this MVPF range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children. We relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy, and we discuss how the MVPF provides lessons for the design of future research.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/qje/qjaa006

Cites

161 of 161 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 164 references

3 of the 164 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 9

  1. Akerlof, 1978, “The Economics of ‘Tagging’ as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning,”, American Economic Review, 68, 8
  2. Boardman, 2017, Cost-Benefit Analysis: Concepts and Practice
  3. Maxfield, 2013, “Th, e
  4. Miller, 2000, “Reforming Welfare and Rewarding Work: Final Report on the Minnesota Family Investment Program. Vol. 1: Effects on Adults and Volume 2: Effects on Children,”
  5. Okun, 1975, Equality and Efficiency
  6. Pavetti, 1995, “Who is Affected by Time Limits?”, 31
  7. U.S. Social Security Administration, 2018, “Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin, 2017,”
  8. Weimer, 2009, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Public Policy
  9. Weimer, 2009, Investing in the Disadvantaged

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 301–400 of 572

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Hendren, N., & Sprung-Keyser, B.
Affiliations
Harvard University (US)
ORCID
Venue
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2020-03-05
Volume
135
Issue
3
Pages
1209-1318
ISSN
  • 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
  • 1531-4650
DOI
10.1093/qje/qjaa006
OpenAlex
W3181398236
Cited by
571
References
164
Citations by year
2026: 83 · 2025: 93 · 2024: 106 · 2023: 95 · 2022: 90 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 28
FWCI
56.98
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • The Quarterly Journal of Economics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1653686, 1745303)
  • Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic and Fiscal Studies
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Politics, Economics, and Education Policy
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Social Policy and Reform Studies
Keywords
marginal value of public funds, social insurance, education policy, job training, taxation, cash transfers, in-kind transfers, willingness to pay, public budget

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review