We discuss the potential role of Universal Basic Incomes (UBIs) in advanced countries. A feature of advanced economies that distinguishes them from developing countries is the existence of well developed, if often incomplete, safety nets. We develop a framework for describing transfer programs, flexible enough to encompass most existing programs as well as UBIs, and use this framework to compare various UBIs to the existing constellation of programs in the United States. A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, non-elderly, non-disabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions.

The past quarter-century has seen substantial change in the social safety nets for families with children in the United States and Canada. Both countries have moved away from cash welfare, but the United States has relied more on work requirements. We examine the implications for the employment and poverty of low-educated single mothers. We find that employment improved substantially in both countries, absolutely and relative to a control group of single women without children. Poverty rates also declined in both countries, with more of the decline coming through market income in the United States and benefit income in Canada.

We assess scientific evidence that has emerged since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding for six well-mixed greenhouse gases and find that this new evidence lends increased support to the conclusion that these gases pose a danger to public health and welfare. Newly available evidence about a wide range of observed and projected impacts strengthens the association between the risk of some of these impacts and anthropogenic climate change, indicates that some impacts or combinations of impacts have the potential to be more severe than previously understood, and identifies substantial risk of additional impacts through processes and pathways not considered in the Endangerment Finding.

New scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups should be brought back to the center of the field. We attempt to further that agenda by exploring an aspect of group influence that has been little studied: the role interest groups play on the inside of government as official participants in bureaucratic decision-making. The challenges for research are formidable, but a fuller understanding of group influence in American politics requires that they be taken on. Here we carry out an exploratory analysis that focuses on the bureaucratic boards that govern public pensions. These are governance structures of enormous financial consequence for state governments, public workers, and taxpayers. They also make decisions that are quantitative (and comparable) in nature, and they usually grant official policymaking authority to a key interest group: public employees and their unions. Our analysis suggests that “interest groups on the inside” do have influence—in ways that weaken effective government. Going forward, scholars should devote greater attention to how insider roles vary across agencies and groups, how groups exercise influence in these ways, how different governance structures shape their policy effects, and what it all means for our understanding of interest groups in American politics.

Most regulations designed to reduce environmental externalities impose costs on individuals and firms. A large and growing literature examines whether these costs are disproportionately borne by different sectors of the economy and/or across different groups of individuals. However, much less is known about how the environmental benefits created by these policies are distributed, which mirror the differences in environmental damages associated with existing environmental externalities. We review this burgeoning literature and develop a simple general framework for empirical analysis. We apply this framework to findings concerning the distributional impacts of environmental damages from air pollution, deforestation, and climate change and highlight priorities for future research. A recurring challenge to understanding the distributional effects of environmental damages is distinguishing between cases in which populations are exposed to different levels or changes in an environmental good and those in which an incremental change in the environment may have very different implications for some populations. In the latter case, it is often difficult to empirically identify the underlying sources of heterogeneity in marginal damages because damages may stem from nonlinear and/or heterogeneous damage functions. Nevertheless, understanding the determinants of heterogeneity in environmental benefits and damages is crucial for welfare analysis and policy design.