Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".

Jonathan Gruber’s market-leading Public Finance and Public Policy was the first textbook to truly reflect the way public policy is created, implemented, and researched. Like no other text available, it integrated real-world empirical work and coverage of transfer programs and social insurance into the traditional topics of public finance. By augmenting the traditional approach of public finance texts with a true integration of theory, application, and evidence, Public Finance and Public Policy engages students like no other public finance text. Thoroughly updated, this timely new edition gives students the basic tools they need to understand the driving issues of public policy today, including healthcare, education, global climate change, entitlements, and more.

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalisation of weed, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen—and how we can do it again. The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas -- and destroying middle class jobs elsewhere. To turn this tide, we must look to a brilliant and all-but-forgotten American success story and embark on a plan that will create the industries of the future -- and the jobs that go with them. Beginning in 1940, massive public investment generated breakthroughs in science and technology that first helped win WWII and then created the most successful economy the world has ever seen. Private enterprise then built on these breakthroughs to create new industries -- such as radar, jet engines, digital computers, mobile telecommunications, life-saving medicines, and the internet-- that became the catalyst for broader economic growth that generated millions of good jobs. We lifted almost all boats, not just the yachts. Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson tell the story of this first American growth engine and provide the blueprint for a second. It's a visionary, pragmatic, sure-to-be controversial plan that will lead to job growth and a new American economy in places now left behind.

"A graphic explanation of the PPACA act"--Provided by publisher.

Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives to leave the labor force. "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the issue of age in the labor force. A notable group of contributors analyzes the relationship between incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons in the workforce, the effects that reforming social security would have on the employment rates of older workers, and how extending labor force participation will affect program costs. Dispelling the myth that employing older workers takes jobs away from the young, this timely volume challenges a raft of existing assumptions about the relationship between old and young people in the workforce.

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalization of pot, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care. At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

To low income women and children, has expanded dramatically over the past decade. This expansion provides a `natural laboratory' for learning about the effect of public health insurance eligibility on insurance coverage, health utilization, and health outcomes. This paper provides an overview of what has been learned about these questions from studying the expansions. Medicaid eligibility rose steeply over the 1984-1992 period, but coverage rose much less sharply, due to limited takeup of benefits. This is partly due to the fact that many eligibles already had private insurance coverage, and evidence suggests that a large share of new enrollees dropped their private coverage to join the program. Nevertheless, utilization of preventive care rose substantially as a result of the expansions, and there were significant improvements in health outcomes, specifically infant and child mortality. While these mortality reductions came at significant cost to the Medicaid program, the cost per life saved was low relative to alternative uses of government funds. These findings highlight both the potential benefits of public insurance policy and the importance of appropriately targeting scarce public health dollars.

Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low income women and children, on savings behavior. We do so using data on asset holdings from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and on consumption from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, matched to information on the eligibility of each household for Medicaid. Exogenous variation in Medicaid eligibility is provided by the dramatic expansion of this program over the 1984-1993 period. We document that Medicaid eligibility has a sizeable and significant negative effect on wealth holdings; we estimate that in 1993 the Medicaid program lowered wealth holdings by 17.7% among the eligible population. We confirm this finding by showing a strong positive association between Medicaid eligibility and consumption expenditures; in 1993, the program raised consumption expenditures among eligibles by 5.2%. We also exploit the fact that asset testing was phased out by the Medicaid program over this period to document that these Medicaid effects are much stronger in the presence of an asset test, confirming the importance of asset testing for household savings decisions.