Research Highlight: B. Ravikumar

Economist and Deputy Director of Research B. Ravikumar's recent paper with Buly Cardak and Gerhard Glomm, "Majority voting in a model of means testing," will be published in the February 2020 issue of the European Economic Review.

The paper looks at means testing of government financial support—programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers—and develops an economic model where the size of the program and the degree of means testing are determined through majority voting. The research addresses the issues of targeting and political support for redistribution and builds on the team's earlier exploration of the failure of education voucher initiatives at the ballot box. 

Full text of the article is available from the journal's website for free until February 29, 2020. The 2018 working paper is available on our site here.