Most efforts to combat fraud and abuse have relied on a punitive-deterrent approach, assuming that higher penalties and stricter enforcement will both punish present offenders and deter potential ones. Social science perspectives, particularly that of systems theory, suggest that a more...

Social programs have a wide variety of effects and often have the explicit objective of improving the economic status of the people they serve. In order to be useful to policymakers, benefit-cost analysis of social programs should explicitly take account of these two important program features....

In the early 1960s, the motivating theme of social services in the American welfare state was reduction of economic dependency. At that time services were highly selective, aimed mainly at poor people. Between 1960 and 1980 there was a drift toward univeralism, as the welfare state expanded to...