TY  - JOUR
AU  - Carneiro,Pedro
AU  - Hansen,Karsten T.
AU  - Heckman,James J.
TI  - Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8840
PY  - 2002
Y2  - March 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8840
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8840.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pedro Carneiro
Department of Economics
University College
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
E-Mail: p.carneiro@ucl.ac.uk

James J. Heckman
Department of Economics
The University of Chicago
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-0634
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: jjh@uchicago.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -