Sunday, April 29, 2007

Determinants of Social Spending

In today's NY Times, the work of my colleagues Alberto Alesina and Ed Glaeser gets some attention:
“Racial divisions and ethnic divisions reduce incentives for people to be generous to others through social welfare,” said Alberto Alesina, a professor of economics at Harvard. “This is very unfortunate. But as social scientists, we can’t close our eyes to something we don’t like.”