Friday, March 14, 2014
Calvert (Omni Shoreham)
An established body of research has examined the linkage between systems of social protection and economic performance. Explanations tend to focus on one of three things: political incentives (e.g., the political demand for redistribution by democratic majorities or mobilized interest groups), consumption smoothing (e.g., social policy as a “piggy bank” for consumption smoothing and for countercyclical demand management) or the fit between modes of social protection and production (e.g., the need of different production regimes for different skills). Recently, scholars have begun to investigate the implications of social protection on population health and health disparities. This paper contributes to this line of inquiry by considering the ways in which “cumulative systems of social protection” affect modal and distributional health outcomes. Unlike existing work, we seek to understand model how one’s cumulative social protection environment—i.e., the cumulative effects throughout the various life stages of individuals or birth cohorts—may be used to evaluate the lifetime impacts of social protection. We utilize information on experienced generosity of social policies in the EU and the United States directed at the young, working age and elderly to evaluate the cumulative effects of policy on health.
