Economic policy

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firms' performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the period 2000–2005. R&D stocks are considered as pivotal input in order to control for their particular contribution to firm-level efficiency. Conceptually, the study quantifies the technical inefficiency of a given company and tests empirically whether R&D activities could explain the distance from the efficient boundary of the production possibility set, i.e. the production frontier. From a policy perspective, the results of this study suggest that – if the aim is to leverage companies' productivity – emphasis should be put on supporting corporate R&D in high-tech sectors and, to some extent, in medium-tech sectors. By contrast, supporting corporate R&D in the low-tech sector turns out to have a minor effect. Instead, encouraging investment in fixed assets appears vital for the productivity of low-tech industries. However, with regard to firms' technical efficiency, R&D matters for all industries (unlike capital intensity). Hence, the allocation of support for corporate R&D seems to be as important as its overall increase and an 'erga omnes' approach across all sectors appears inappropriate.

OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to examine how diagnosis is perceived by a sample of newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients.
METHODS: A qualitative study was carried out in the Lothian region of Scotland using in-depth interviews of 40 newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients recruited from 16 general practices in four Local Health Care Co-operatives and three hospital clinics. Purposive selection ensured that the sample's demographic characteristics were broadly representative of newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients in Lothian/Scotland.
RESULTS: Clarity, timing and authority of the diagnosis delivery were highly salient for patients. Many patients perceived their GP as unwilling to deliver/confirm the diagnosis. Patients who were not referred to hospital were unclear why a referral had not taken place. Those referred perceived confirmation of diagnosis by the consultant as a central reason. Waiting for a hospital appointment could be problematic for patients. Most wanted the diagnosis confirmed before they felt confident making lifestyle changes. Input from health services during the period prior to the hospital visit was highly valued. Waiting was taken by some asymptomatic patients to indicate that they did not have the condition. Others used a lengthy period of waiting to confirm their view that they had a 'milder' or 'less serious' form of diabetes than other patients.
CONCLUSIONS: Adequate input from practitioners is needed to ensure that diagnosis is fully exploited as a crucial period in which patients learn to adapt to their condition. Being explicit about the diagnosis at first contact may avoid the problem of patients feeling 'in limbo' or uncertain whether they have type 2 diabetes. Practitioners should convey to patients that post-diagnosis/initial care is a process, stages of this process should be clarified to avoid misunderstanding and services should be integrated during this interim period to best effect.

The growing prevalence of type 2 diabetes is placing Scottish health services under considerable strain. Consequently, diabetes services are undergoing a major process of reorganisation, including the devolvement of routine diabetes care/diabetic review from secondary to primary healthcare settings. This qualitative study was devised to explore newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients’ perceptions of their disease and the health services they receive at a time when this restructuring of services is taking place. The sample comprised 40 patients resident in Lothian, Scotland, who had diverse experiences of services, some receiving GP-based care only, others having varying contact with hospital diabetes clinics. In-depth interviews were undertaken with patients, three times at six monthly intervals over 1 year, enabling their experiences to be tracked at critical junctures during the post-diagnostic period. Disease perceptions and health service delivery were found to be mutually informing and effecting. Not only did (different types of) health service delivery influence the ways in which patients thought about and self-managed their disease, over time patients’ disease perceptions also informed their expectations of, and preferences for, diabetes services. We thus argue that there is a need for a reconceptualisation within the medical social sciences to take into account the context of healthcare and the economic/policy factors that inform health service delivery when looking at patients’ disease perceptions. We also discuss the logistical and ethical challenges of drawing upon patients’ perspectives, preferences and views in the design and delivery of future health services.

Keywords: Diabetes; Lay understandings; Health service delivery; Self-management; Scotland; UK

In Europe, many employees receive company cars as fringe benefits induced by taxation. We analyse the welfare effects of company car taxation for the Netherlands by estimating to what extent car expenditure and private car travel change when employees receive a company car. Tax treatment of company cars generates a welfare loss ranging from €600 to €780 per year per company car, mainly due to a shift towards more expensive cars (from €420 to €600 per year), but also due to increased private travel (€180 per year). For the whole of Europe, we estimate the welfare deadweight loss to be about €12 billion per year.

This paper analyzes the effects of monetized and non monetized government debt on real and nominal output and inflation. A brief review of therotical discussions is presented first and then an empirical model of budget deficits in which monetary base and M1 are taken as measures of monetization is developed and applied to the Turkish data for the period 1967-1999.

It is a delicate and pretentious endeavour to examine Iraq in current times. It is delicate in the sense that new facts and consequences of the Coalition’s presence in Iraq are broadcast on a daily basis and discussed worldwide. Yet it is also pretentious because of the impressive volume of academic work about Iraq that has appeared during the last four years. There is now a solid body of scholarship on issues such as the Coalition’s interpretation and misuse of occupation law, the legality of the use of force, Western imperialistic aspirations over Iraq, and successes and failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s administration of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Keeping those concerns in mind, this paper establishes a discursive trajectory across all these topics. I will argue that the modern evolution of occupation law is intertwined with the Coalition’s misinterpretation and misuse of their obligations under international law, and examine how a radical interpretation of occupation law has affected the prospects of democracy and stability in Iraq.

Urbanization has long been known to exert serious impact on the environment. One key impact is the alteration of water fluxes within and out of an urbanizing watershed. It is therefore of interest to land use planners to be able to predict the potential effects of landuse change on stream flows, especially the effect caused by the additional impervious surface introduced by new development. Prediction of stream flow changes would be more meaningful if compared across different development scenarios so that the best development option, based on its impact on the stream flow, can be determined. This paper describes the application of SWAT for assessing the impact of impervious surface on the daily stream flow of a small watershed in North Carolina, USA. The study investigates the changes in flow components of the stream under the influence of different percentages (and types) of impervious surface for eleven hypothetical residential layouts. After diverse spatial data are assimilated through a geographical information system, the predictive uncertainty has been carefully estimated. Results confirm that different residential layout designs with their different amount of impervious surface generate different impacts on flow components. The study thus successfully demonstrates that a distributed hydrological model like SWAT can be useful in understanding the impact of development characteristics on the hydrology of a watershed.

"Abstract
The world economy is facing the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression of the last century. The risk of global recession has heightened significantly and volatility of commodity prices, which is the mainstay of most developing countries like Nigeria, has increased further. If this situation continues to deteriorate, developing countries could be in great jeopardy. This study examined the influence of the Global Financial Crisis on Nigerian economy. It was discovered that the financial crisis will cause fall in commodity prices, decline in export, lower portfolio and FDI inflow, fall in equity market, decline in remittance from abroad etc. It was recommended that the federal government should come up with intervention policies that will minimise these effects and jumpstart the economy and that business operator should learn to do things using resources at their disposal to develop and expand at manageable level to stem the tide of the crisis."

This paper analyses the role of public and private responsibility in the provision of public goods –specifically national hurricane preparedness, including early warnings
and post-impact recovery. This is achieved through a review of the changes that have occurred in the Cayman Islands' National Hurricane Committee (NHC). The NHC is a novel hybrid institution that emerged after spontaneous collective action by various members of the Cayman Islands' society. The National Hurricane Committee is now an official public-social-private partnership that uses relational contracting transactions, hierarchical management relationships and recurrent contractual transactions to prepare the Cayman Islands for storms and manage the islands' recovery in a state of emergency. In this paper, the effectiveness of the NHC is considered in terms of how the risks are being managed, who takes responsibility for risk management, who pays for the services, and who bears the risk. The discussion reveals that PPPs can provide effective governance structures for weather-risk management, but they need to be carefully implemented to ensure that the  distribution of costs and benefits from their existence is not captured by a small group of powerful individuals.

La investigación que presenta este documento es una mirada crítica y local de la relación entre palma de aceite y desarrollo por medio del estudio del caso de María la Baja, un municipio colombiano atestado de especificidades por ser lugar de afrocolombianos fugados de la estructura colonial, espacios geográficos de la naciente cañicultura colombiana, objeto de reforma agraria y conflicto por el uso de la tierra, territorio golpeado por el proceso de cambio neoliberal y comarca en disputa por los actores armados del periodo reciente del conflicto armado. El estudio buscó analizar las condiciones sociales, políticas y económicas de la situación del campesinado en el lugar de estudio, y comprender la política pública que determinó la elección por la actividad productiva del cultivo de la palma. En otras palabras, ¿Cuáles han sido las implicaciones de la alianza productiva y social de María la Baja  para producir aceite de palma sobre el Desarrollo local del Municipio?, para lo cual enfocó la atención en la trayectoria del territorio y en su dinámica derivada de políticas estatales promotoras del modelo de producción para el cultivo de palma, proponiendo la hipótesis de que es la confluencia de condiciones naturales, construidas y socioeconómicas propias del territorio la propiciadora de la instauración del cultivo de palma y la política pública agrícola definida por el poder estatal central la garante de su permanencia, así como que la concentración de capitales en unos actores es finalmente el significado de la manera en que es producida la palma de aceite. Para demostrar esto acojo el enfoque político del desarrollo local influenciado por Arocena, Boisier, Enriquez y Gallicchio que prepondera el análisis de las asimetrías de los recursos de poder que poseen los diferentes actores locales, pera también la necesidad de la construcción consensuada, o por lo menos, negociada de un proyecto común para la gestión de la riqueza, debido a que lo considero el enfoque más pertinente para pensar el desarrollo local en un lugar determinado por históricas políticas públicas nacionales, golpeado por el conflicto armado y actualmente dependiente de un actor exógeno que coordina la actividad económica preponderante en el municipio: la palma de aceite. De allí que haya elegido instrumentos cualitativos para el acopio de la información y presentar los hallazgos en cuanto a la generación de empleo, las diferencias del acceso al crédito de fomento para los distintos cultivos, la oferta de alimentos en el lugar y la generación de ingresos para el municipio derivados de la actividad palmicultora. El cierre está a cargo de reflexiones en torno a la incertidumbre en cuanto a la productividad para el territorio de esta actividad, la naturaleza excluyente de la política pública agraria en Colombia y la propuesta de alternativas para encaminar un proceso de desarrollo local en este municipio del Caribe Colombiano.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rarely addressed issues related to the Internet as a medium. The one area where the court has seen fit to comment more than once is the distribution of indecent materials to minors. The court has addressed this issue in several high profile cases, including Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), the first foray by the Court into Internet jurisprudence. While numerous legal scholars have revisited the Court decisions in these cases, nowhere in the current literature is there a discussion of the Court’s understanding of the parent-child relationship in general, and specifically how that relationship relates to new technologies. As such, this research project seeks to discover the understanding of parent-child interactions used by the Supreme Court as it relates to technology. Do new mediums influence the court’s image of parental involvement in the child’s life? Understanding what ideal the court has formed regarding parent-child-technology relationships can provide better understanding about past court decisions, and assist legal scholars as they study future cases that involve juvenile interactions with the Internet.

Since late 1970s scholars have done much research on it, but conclusions from different scholars may differ in many ways. It is mainly due to different analytic approaches, perspectives, spatial units, statistical indicators and different periods for studies. On the basis of previous analyses and findings, we have done some further quantitative computation and empirical study, and revealed the inter-provincial disparity and regional disparity of economic development and their evolution trends from 1952—2000. The main conclusions are: ① Regional disparity in economic development in China, including the inter-provincial disparity, inter-regional disparity and intra-regional disparity, has existed for years. ② Gini coefficient and Theil coefficient have revealed a similar dynamic trend for comparative disparity in economic development between provinces in China. From 1952 to 1978, except for the "Great Leap Forward" period, comparative disparity basically assumes a upward trend and it assumed a slowly downward trend from 1979 to1990. Afterwards from 1991 to 2000 the disparity assumed a slowly upward trend again. In other words, the strategy of regional balanced development before the reform and opening up did not bring us a reduction in comparative disparity of regional economic development, nor did the lopsided development strategy implemented since then bring us an expansion of comparative disparity of regional economic development in China. ③ A comparison between Shanghai and Guizhou shows that absolute inter-provincial disparity has been quite big for years. The disparity of economic development between the two provinces expanded till 1978 and reduced after the reform and opening up. Since 1990 the disparity began to expand for the second times with a slight drop in 1998. ④ The R/S analysis result tell us that In the "Great Cultural Revolution" period, i.e. 1966-1978, the Hurst exponent H=0.504≈0.5, indicates that in this period the evolution of comparative inter-provincial disparity of economic development showed a random characteristic, and In the other period, i.e. 1952-1965, 1979-1990 and 1991-2000, the Hurst exponent H>0.5 indicates that in this period the evolution of the comparative inter-provincial disparity of economic development in China has a long-enduring characteristic.

This paper shows the dynamic process of regional disparity of economic development in China in the past 50 years from a new insight by using the rescaled range statistic (R/S) analysis and wavelet analysis of the Theil index sequence with different time scales. The main conclusions are: 1) The regional disparity of economic development in China, including the inter-provincial disparity, inter-regional disparity and intra-regional disparity, has existed for many years. Theil index by the comparative price has revealed the true trend for comparative disparity of regional economic development from 1952 to 2000. 2) Decomposition of Theil index indicates that the dynamic trend of comparative inter-provincial disparity in the coastal region is in line with dynamic trend of inter-provincial disparity in the whole China. 3) The R/S analysis results tell us that during 1966-1978, the Hurst exponent H=0.504 approximate to 0.5, which indicates that in that period the evolution of comparative inter-provincial disparity of economic development showed a random characteristic, and in the other periods, i.e. 1952-1965, 1979-1990 and 1991-2000, the Hurst exponent H>0.5, which indicates that in those periods the evolution of the comparative inter-provincial disparity of economic development in China had a long-enduring characteristic. 4) By using wavelet analysis at different time scale, we arrived at a conclusion that the evolutionary process of the disparity of economic development of China is not a simple inverted U shape but a compound of several U shapes. The result tells us that the evolutionary plot of inter-provincial disparity in China follows the inverted U on the whole at the higher scale, 24 ( 16 years). That is to say, the disparity tends to rise in the first stage of economic development, and fall slowly over the peak in the second stage of economic development. However, if we shorten the time scale to 23 ( 8 years), then a link of several U shapes will appear.

Despite financial innovations that have created important new substitutes for cash usage, per capita holdings of U.S. currency amount to $2950. Yet American households and businesses admit to holding only 15 percent of the currency stock, leaving the whereabouts of 85 percent unknown. Some fraction of this unaccounted for currency is held abroad (the dollarization hypothesis) and some is held domestically undeclared, as a store of value and a medium of exchange for transactions involving the production and distribution of illegal goods and services, and for transactions earning income that is not reported to the IRS (the underground economy hypothesis).
We find that the percentage of U.S. currency currently held overseas is between 30-37 percent rather than the widely cited figure of 65 percent. This finding is based on the official Federal Reserve/Bureau of Economic Analysis data which is a proxy measure of the New York Federal Reserve’s (NYB) “confidential” data on wholesale currency shipments abroad. We recommend that the NYB data be aggregated so as to circumvent confidentiality concerns, and be made readily available in order to shed greater light on the question of how much U.S. currency is abroad while providing important information on the location of overseas U.S. dollars.
The newly revised official estimates of overseas currency holdings are employed to determine the Federal Reserve’s seigniorage earnings from 1964-2010, which have provided a $185 billion windfall for U.S. taxpayers. Overseas currency stock data are also used to derive estimates of the domestically held stock of currency as well as narrow and broad measures of domestic monetary aggregates. These domestic monetary aggregates are believed to be better predictors of future economic activity than traditional monetary aggregates and are tested to determine their ability to predict fluctuations in real output and prices.
Domestic cash holdings are finally used to estimate the size of the U.S. fiscal underground economy as measured by the amount of income that is not properly reported to the IRS. By 2010, “unreported income” approached $2 trillion, implying a “tax gap” in the range of $430- $475 billion. Currently, we estimate that 18-19 percent of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS.

Forthcoming in Crime, Law and Social Change.

Keywords: Overseas currency, currency abroad, underground economy; unreported economy; tax gap; tax evasion; cash payments; monetary aggregates.
JEL Classifications: E26; H26; O17; E41; E52

A broad political economics literature explains the introduction and expansion of pension systems, but the effects caused by the endogenous reduction of fertility are typically disregarded, as the fertility choice is usually considered exogenous. This paper suggests a political model that takes into account these effects and analyzes the net effect of the reduction of fertility costs on the dimension of pension systems. Some stylized facts support an inverted-U development pattern: a continuous and progressive increase of the fertility cost, after inducing the introduction of pension systems, tends to reduce, ceteris paribus, their political support.

With the global financial crisis becoming a global economic crisis, the South African economy is facing challenges both from external and domestic quarters in terms of lower aggregate demand. In the following sections we will try to argue that perusing inflation targeting in a time of crisis has made task of the central bank to revive domestic demand more challenging. The internal growth dynamic will deteriorate further on the back of more vulnerable household sector and contracting household demand.

A variety of opinions either in favour or
against development of biofuels has risen in the last
years related to the environmental, economic and social
impacts that its diffusion could entail compared to
petroleum. Although the EU, in general, and Spain, in
particular, are strongly supporting the development of
biofuels they highlight that energy planning must be
based on a sound analysis of the impacts of the diverse
alternatives. This poster is a preliminary approach to
this analysis. The main aim is to prioritize a set of
environmental, economic and social objectives to
identify the most relevant issues that would allow
evaluating the impacts of the biofuel production and
consumption in Spain. Analytic Network Process (ANP)
and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are the
multicriteria decision-making methodologies
implemented to deal with the problem based on experts’
knowledge. The superiority of ANP versus AHP is
discussed and the former is recommended. Results
indicate that the most important objectives for a
sustainable development of biofuels in Spain are
conservation of non-renewable resources, within the
environmental issues, the ease to be technically
implemented in production, storage, distribution, and
consumption, within the economic issues, and the direct
employment in the agro-energy system, within the social
issues.

Product development partnership (PDP) success rests on an ability to create new science and technology but it also depends on the creation of new organisational structures and cultures which can successfully develop appropriate technology and products and get them to those who need them.  One of the main reasons PDPs are supported and funded is that they constitute a ‘social technology’ innovation.  As such they work both with ‘above the radar’ established and formal mechanisms for developing new products and with ‘below the radar’ networks, organisations and physical technologies in developing countries so that products are appropriate, understood and accepted and can be made accessible to those who need them.  We argue that thinking about PDPs in this light provides a useful framework for evaluation.

Executive summary
This report is the evaluation of the first project of Education Walsall’s Commissioning Group.  It commissioned a cluster of primary schools in one ward of the local authority in April 2007 to develop and implement a whole school approach to improve the lifestyles of students, staff, parents/guardians and the wider community with the aim of contributing to the prevention of childhood obesity. This executive summary outlines the evaluation’s broad findings, key messages, lessons learned and recommendations. 

Recommendations
• Introduce a range of interventions, applied locally, addressing both food and exercise, with particular focus on areas such as school meals and involving children in cooking
• Interventions need to focus on involving parents and families
• Target travel to school - the project had a significant impact here.
• Research is still limited into childhood obesity.  The project cohort is a substantial dataset which could be monitored further as the children mature to produce valuable data in what is still an emerging area for research and policy.

While the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has certainly benefitted Mexico in many ways over the past fifteen years, many obstacles to developing efficient logistics operations still exist. This paper discusses these major challenges—governmental policies and insufficient transportation infrastructure—as well as several minor impediments, and it provides some suggestions for improving organizations’ ability to conduct trade through Mexico.

This paper examines the desirability and feasibility of replacing the present system of personal and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive revenue neutral Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax. In its simplest form, the APT tax consists of a flat tax levied on all transactions. The tax is automatically assessed and collected when transactions are settled through the electronic technology of the banking/ payments system. The APT tax introduces progressivity through the tax base since the volume of final payments includes exchanges of titles to property and is therefore more highly skewed than the conventional income or consumption tax base. The wealthy carry out a disproportionate share of total transactions and therefore bear a disproportionate burden of the tax despite its flat rate structure. The automated recording of all APT tax payments by firms and individuals creates a degree of transparency and perceived fairness that induces greater tax compliance. Also, the tax has lower administrative and compliance cost. Like all taxes, the APT tax creates new distortions whose costs must be weighted against the benefits obtained by replacing the current tax system

This paper develops a new instrumental-variable (IV) approach to estimate the effects of di¤erent exchange rate regimes on bilateral outcomes. The basic idea is that the characteristics of the exchange rate regime between two countries (exchange rate variability, …xed or ‡oat, autonomous or common currencies) are partially related to the independent decisions of these countries to peg -explicitly or de facto-to a third currency, notably that of a main anchor. Our approach is to use this component of the exchange rate regime as an IV in regressions of bilateral outcomes. We illustrate the methodology with one speci…c application: the economic e¤ects of currency unions. The likelihood that two countries independently adopt the currency of the same anchor country is used as an instrument for whether they share or not a common currency. Three …ndings stand out. First, sharing a common currency enhances trade, supporting previous work by Rose [2000]. Second, a common currency increases price co-movements; this …nding is consistent with the observation that a large part of the variation in real exchange rates is caused by ‡uctuations in nominal exchange rates. Finally, a common currency decreases the co-movement of shocks to real GDP. This is consistent with the view that currency unions lead to greater specialization.

For some time, one line of research on trust in government has stressed that trust results from evaluations of the institutions of government. Here, trust reflects public sentiments toward the responsiveness of the political process. Another line of research has alternatively countered that trust tends to be a reflection of political leaders. But this research has been largely unable to demonstrate that the performance of authorities matters relative to evaluations of the political process. Changes in partisan control of Congress and the presidency, however, provides us with a natural experiment where authorities change while the political process is constant. Here, partisans should trust government more when their party controls Congress, the presidency, or both. I find that trust does respond to changes in partisan control of the Congress and presidency, which demonstrates that the effect of authorities matters relative to evaluations of the political process.

We consider a directed search model for a finite economy with heterogeneous firms in two informational environments. In the first, the productivity of all firms is publicly observed. We prove existence of equilibria in pure posting strategies by firms and show that wage dispersion is driven by fundamentals: more productive firms post higher wages and wage dispersion is absent when firms are homogeneous. When firms have heterogeneous productivities the equilibrium is not constrained efficient. These results extend to a second environment in which productivities are private information: Equilibria in pure strategies exist; strategies are increasing in productivity; and constrained efficiency does not obtain. * We thank

We study the United States Congress by constructing networks between Members of Congress based on the legislation that they cosponsor. Using the concept of modularity, we identify the community structure of Congressmen, as connected via sponsorship/cosponsorship of the same legislation, to investigate the collaborative communities of legislators in both chambers of Congress. This analysis yields an explicit and conceptually clear measure of political polarization, demonstrating a sharp increase in partisan polarization which preceded and then culminated in the 104th Congress (1995-1996), when Republicans took control of both chambers. Although polarization has since waned in the U.S. Senate, it remains at historically high levels in the House of Representatives.

This guide aims to induce more economists to talk to people in the media as a means of expanding educational outreach. It provides discussions of "dos" and "don'ts" and offers advice on which kinds of research are likely to interest reporters. It suggests specific approaches to dealing with reporters in different types of media, including print, radio and television.

Hardly any economist or economic historian now disputes that technical progress and advances in scientific knowledge underpin all long-term, sustained economic growth. Sure, in the short run, sharp spurts of improvement in economic performance can arise from investing in factories, streamlining transportation and distribution networks, bettering market structure, and removing impediments to production and trade. But significant and desirable though such policy actions might be, by themselves they at best move society only towards a static and fixed state of increased economic welfare; further gains eventually grind to a halt. Only through improvements in technology can enduring growth continue.

We examine the implications of tax and subsidy policies for employment in the "three worlds of welfare", Anglo-Saxon, Continental European and Scandinavian. We argue that home production is key to a proper evaluation of the employment outcomes. Anglo-Saxon low-support policies encourage more overall market employment. Continental transfer policies encourage more home production in services with close substitutes at home. Scandinavian policies give incentives to move home production in social services to the market but discourage other service activity. We find support for our claims in sectoral employment data for five representative countries, United States, Britain, France, Italy and Sweden.

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 to 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.