CEF.UP – WiP Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – November 22^nd, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Universal Basic Income: The Worst Bar All Others?”

Luís Guimarães – Cef.up (joint work with Diogo Lourenço)

Abstract:

“Extant welfare programmes introduce unintended distortions and suffer from low take-up, transfers to ineligible recipients, and administrative costs. A noteworthy alternative, arguably immune to these imperfections, is a Universal Basic Income (UBI), i.e., an unconditional transfer to all citizens. Yet, UBI is a blunt instrument that does not discriminate rich from poor and is useless for incentivizing work or further education. The welfare and other macroeconomic impacts of replacing means-tested welfare programmes with a UBI are therefore far from obvious. To elucidate them, we build a dynamic general-equilibrium model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents. We find that replacing a suite of means-tested US programmes with an expenditure neutral UBI would increase the stock of capital, employment, and output, but lower welfare. Further experiments, however, also indicate that if the magnitude of current transfers increased substantially, an expenditure neutral UBI would be welfare-improving.”