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A topic of long-standing discussion in Japan has been how to equitably merge the retirement plans for civil servants and private employees, which in the past have been managed separately. Recent legislation sought to unify social security pension schemes for all employees by extending the coverage of the Japanese Employees’ Pension Insurance Scheme, which covers private employees, to include civil servants as well. The author describes how Japanese social security pension schemes have evolved, the forces driving the merger of these plans, and what future prospects may be.

The 1996 welfare reform law marked a sharp exclusionary turn in US immigrant policy by imposing new and unprecedented bans on the receipt of public benefits by legal immigrants. Although in the years following the law's passage, benefit eligibility was restored to certain classes of immigrants, the law nonetheless represents a watershed in US immigration history. Welfare reform also ushered in a number of normative and institutional changes that, when taken together, had profound “chilling effects” on immigrants’ use of public benefits, even among those who remained eligible. Welfare reform has transformed the governance of immigrant policy by devolving authority over eligibility and responsibility for benefit costs to states.

This lecture discusses the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which was established due to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War. It looks at the scale of the changes that occurred in constitutional arrangements, and considers the fact that these changes have been achieved without damaging the underlying constitutional arrangements and traditions of the United Kingdom. The lecture also considers whether these changes would benefit the public, and studies some of the arguments that are both in favour of and against the ECHR in becoming a part of the country's law.

This chapter examines alternative annuity designs, and the interactions between annuity preference and publicly provided safety net support. It is shown that with a minimum pension guarantee, the variable annuity is the most preferred annuity. Inflation insured annuity products are popular among the rich and risk-averse. Non-life instruments are also popular, but are quite expensive for government revenue.

Multipillar social security systems consist of two parts: a privately managed funded defined contribution (DC) plan that handles workers' retirement saving and a publicly managed, tax-financed defined benefit plan that prevents poverty, equalizes more broadly, and diversifies risk. The DC plan is, by definition, contributory and designed to ensure that workers' standard of living will not drop dramatically in old age. Some countries impose few constraints on investments or payouts, while other countries impose large constraints to protect ill-informed or myopic workers from making mistakes. The public benefit has varying degrees of links to contributions in different countries. In some cases (e.g. Australia) it is mainly redistributive and financed by general revenues, while in other cases (e.g. the notional defined contribution plans in Sweden and Poland) a stronger link exists between benefits and payroll contributions. The Latin American public pillars offer a mixed approach that falls in between these two extremes. This chapter summarizes the key policy choices a country must make that strongly affect gender outcomes. Ultimately, value judgments are indispensable in making these choices and designing the system.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the multi-year design process leading to the implementation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in 2008. It considers the question: How did RGGI’s policy designers succeed in auctioning virtually all of the program’s emissions allowances, wheresimilar efforts to promote auctions failed? After reviewing the limits of existing explanations of RGGI’s decision to auction allowances that are grounded in the interest group politics model, the chapter offers a detailed analysis of the RGGI design process to demonstrate the central role of the new public benefit model in making auctions politically viable. Public and private accounts confirm the prominence of this new normative framing for auctions from the very beginning of the process, and its influence over the political choice to make this policy change.

This chapter reviews the theory of normative reframing that is at the heart of the book’s explanation for sudden policy change, and the evidence of normative reframing’s role in the unprecedented policy shift toward auctioning emissions allowances from 2008-2015. It then offers some concluding thoughts on the wider implications of the expansion of auctions since RGGI, and the theory of normative reframing for climate and environmental policymaking, as well as for understanding sudden policy change in general. In particular, the chapter concludes that the choice of how to distribute benefits from future climate policies will be the most important factor determining the political success of those policies, and that policies such as cap and trade with auction using public benefit framing remain the most promising policy option going forward.

Public Benefit Corporations (“PBCs”) are a revolutionary new form of business organization that overturn the fundamental corporate principle of shareholder wealth maximization. Of the many questions that surround this new entity type, perhaps the most perplexing is why Delaware – the most influential and important state for corporate law by far – chose to adopt it. I explore this troubling question through qualitative empirical research. I find that Delaware primarily wanted to serve the needs of social entrepreneurs and financiers, but also hoped to harness the power of capitalism to remedy social ills that government has so far failed to fix. The PBC statute rather poorly implements either of these goals. The PBC statute is not a very good enforcement tool. On the other hand, the statute may prove an effective reinforcement tool, aiding sincere social entrepreneurs to pursue their various missions. Also, private ordering, such as certification by outside entities like B Lab, may fill many of the important gaps left by the law.

This chapter details how late Ottoman reforms introduced notions of hygiene and aesthetics that reshaped the relationship between the home and its urban context. Drawing on nineteenth-century global modes of knowledge that privileged rectilinear urban forms and sought to manage daily lives in expanding cities, new bodies of Ottoman law introduced an understanding of "public benefit" that tied domestic habits and individual lives to the public collectivity of the city. The implementation of these laws by the municipal council of Beirut also brought capitalist changes into the home, redefining it as property with a value linked to urban beautification projects. But in the absence of a clear understanding of the relationship between public benefit and the home, the latter remained an open site of contestation, amenable to interpretation as a link between private lives and the larger project of modernity.

While studies of higher education often focus on costs and benefits of policies and programs, few have examined the ratio of benefits to costs, i.e., productivity. This book advances the frontier of knowledge about productivity in higher education. We use newly available data that allow us to better assess benefits and analyze costs. There are several challenges, including multiple outcomes: skills, earnings, invention, altruism, and many other outcomes. Even if we have data on all such outcomes, how are researchers to prioritize them for analysis? A related difficulty is the "multi-product" nature of institutions of higher education such as different levels of degree programs, research, etc. Further challenges involve selection on students’ aptitude and prior achievement, attribution when students change schools, and the public nature of some potential benefits of higher education. We introduce the volume by describing how each chapter confronts these challenges. Together they constitute a concise course in approaches to overcoming these challenges when measuring productivity in higher education.

In 1981, Chile replaced a mature, traditional, government-run, pay-as-you-go defined benefit system with a new multipillar system that included a defined contribution plan along with a public benefit in the form of a minimum pension guarantee (MPG). The old system was insolvent, having promised benefits that increasingly exceeded contributions. Many workers and employers evaded the payroll tax, exacerbating the fiscal problem. The objectives of the reform were to make the system largely funded and therefore fiscally sustainable; to manage the funds privately in order to avoid political manipulation; to link benefits more closely with contributions, thereby reducing the tax element and the vulnerability of the system's finances to evasion; and to make the redistributive element explicit and better targeted. This chapter analyzes whether women in Chile were helped or hurt by this reform.

This chapter describes the “old” model of cap-and-trade policy design that largely controlled emissions trading policy from its origins in the 1970s through the 1990s, under which emissions trading programs were adopted reluctantly, and “grandfathered” emissions allowances to current emitters at no cost. It also describes some important events starting in the 1990s that helped lay the groundwork for the sudden switch to auctions in RGGI, including: greater attention to allocation rules by political actors, new precedents such as spectrum rights auctions and severance taxes on some nature resources, new political and economic pressures from electricity deregulation, and the emergence of “public benefit” charges and programs to improve energy efficiency for consumers. In addition, this period saw the emergence of new polluter pays and public ownership normative frames in the context of emissions allowances. At the same time, the chapter documents how these initial changes were insufficient to successfully promote allowance auctions in the development of two prominent cap and trade programs: the initial phase of the EU ETS from 1998-2005, and the NOx Budget emissions trading program from 1994-2005.

This chapter explains the concept of democratic deliberation and considers its implications for ethical review of human subjects research. Democratic deliberation is an ethical principle relatively new to research ethics. It involves a public exchange of ideas within and across groups of ordinary citizens, experts, and political representatives, and requires participants to engage actively with one another, to offer reasons that are acceptable and intelligible to their interlocutors, and to revise their decisions as new information and new perspectives come into view.Incorporating democratic deliberation into human subjects research would recommend greater inclusion of participants in the review process. This might be achieved by seating participants or their advocates on IRBs, and by otherwise involving them on advisory committees overseeing research. Such inclusion of research participants would follow the model of advisory committees elsewhere in the health care system, which include patients and other stakeholders. It would also counsel against exempting public benefits research, such as experimentation with Medicare and Medicaid benefits, from ethical review.

This chapter presents a detailed empirical assessment of cross-country variation in the regulation of interest groups and public benefit organizations in the operation stage—covering the regulation of these organizations’ constitutive functions as well as of resource access—across nineteen long-lived democracies. Regarding regulation of organizations’ constitutive functions, it covers areas such as lobby regulation, third-party regulation, and other legal restrictions on groups’ political activities. In terms of resource regulation, it covers aspects such as tax benefits for donors and organizations themselves as well as the regulation of fundraising. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the monitoring and supervision structures in charge of implementing group regulation. The analysis shows how interest groups and public benefit organizations have to operate within a complex web of legal regulation, which fundamentally affects their ability to engage in political activities and access state resources.

In 1997, Mexico replaced its old, traditional, pay-as-you-go defined benefit system with a multipillar system that included a funded defined contribution component. This chapter analyzes how women fared in this process. It shows that the defined contribution plans in the new systems have subtle features that favor women, such as the heavier weight given to earnings early in adulthood. These are reinforced by the joint annuity, which transfers income from husbands to wives, and the public benefit, the social quote (SQ), which redistributes to low earners. As the lowest earners in each education category, women will inevitably benefit from such redistributions.

This chapter examines the incidence of disability among working-age men and the impact it has on income and benefit receipt. The results reveal that about 30 percent of men in the United States experience some form of disability and that the economic consequences are similar to those experienced by displaced workers—substantially lower earnings and income. For those who report chronic, severe disabilities, the costs are especially large and are not offset by increased income from other sources. Thus, disability comes with economic costs for the individual that are not offset by either government or family support.

This chapter seeks to answer whether corporate governance principles apply to public benefit foundations, taking into account the specific structure of philanthropic foundations as asset-based and purpose-driven organisations without owners and shareholders, and, if so, in which ways? In search of a response, the chapter reviews internal and external governance rules of public benefit foundations as tools to safeguard the will of the founder(s) and pursuit of the statutory public benefit purpose in a comparative perspective and places them in the context of recent policy. The chapter concludes that classical corporate governance theory, including principal–agent theory, is not suitable for public benefit foundations and more comprehensive principles should be further developed and tested. It also suggests that the interplay of hard law and soft law as well as internal and external governance elements seems necessary to provide appropriate governance approaches.

Drawing on a broad definition of family, this chapter explores the challenges of reuniting with family and finding a stable home after release. Few formerly incarcerated individuals return to the residences where they were living before their imprisonment. This is because their families moved in the interim, because many live in institutional housing after release, and because many purposely try to avoid the social environments they experienced before imprisonment. Formerly incarcerated individuals also experience extremely high rates of residential instability and frequent homelessness. This is because of the short-term nature of institutional housing, custodial sanctions for parole violations, substance abuse relapse, meager public benefits, and family conflict. Those who do achieve residential stability overwhelmingly do so as a result of finding a place in a stable home with family or romantic partners or because they are able to combine public benefits or employment with monetary support from family. Families provide a critical set of basic material resources like food and shelter for the formerly incarcerated.