London School of Economics

Does Social Insurance Help Secure Property Rights?

Email address: robertmacculloch@compuserve.com

Keywords: Social Insurance, Property Rights, Revolt.

JEL Classifications: D23, D31, D74.

Abstract:
This paper develops a model to show how social insurance affects revolt against property rights and the consequences for the optimal design of the welfare state. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived from surveys across over 200,000 randomly sampled individuals from the 1970s to the 1990s. After controlling for personal characteristics of respondents, country fixed effects, year dummies, as well as country-specific time trends, less people are found to support revolt when the generosity of either the elderly person's social security or unemployment benefits increases. A one standard deviation change in either variable explains around one standard deviation of the proportion of people supporting revolt, measured across the countries and years in the sample. The personal characteristic that has the largest effect on reducing the support for revolt is being religious.

PDF file of paper: macculloch.pdf

Session: Social Economics I

Time: Friday, 6 July, 8:45am - 10:15am

Room: F