The majority of Americans receive their health insurance for themselves and their families through their job. The employee pays a portion of the premium but the employer chooses the type and amount of coverage offered as well as administers the plan. This book addresses the question: Who really pays for employer-arranged health insurance? Are premiums paid from company profits or do employees bear the cost through lower wages? Pauly suggests that this confusion has complicated the debate on public policy and needs to be alleviated. This work first shows how views taken by business and political leaders during the Clinton health reform proposal debate were affected by this confusion and did not follow the economic view. It then provides a novel, intuitive, but comprehensive outline of the economic theory that bears on this question. Empirical evidence consistent with the economic view is summarized, and the implications of the view for some important issues in health policy and in practical health benefits management are discussed in detail. Health Benefits at Work explores the political economy of health policy when the stakeholders have an uncertain and possibly incorrect understanding of their actual interests. For the benefits specialist, it provides an accessible treatment of the complex and often counterintuitive economics of health benefits. This will appeal to the health policy community as well as economists and anyone concerned with issues surrounding health insurance in employment settings. "This book is refreshing . . . clean and intuitive; the logic devastating." --Michael A. Morrissey

While homeownership has clear benefits among the impoverished, The Homeowner Ideology shows that the utility of real property rights as an economic resource are severely limited in sub-Saharan African cities. Although global poverty has declined since 1990, it remains widespread in Subsahara, the region with the highest proportion of the global population living in slums. Mainstream thinking in development studies is dominated by market fundamentalist neoclassical economics and the premise that ownership reduces poverty. Singumbe Muyeba contends that this neoliberal premise is flawed and unsupported by data within the African context. Muyeba argues that property rights function as structured idle capital on the formal market in African cities and the persistence of homeownership as the intervention of choice is explained by the influence of neoliberal ideology, intergenerational transfer of homeownership culture within the family, and the state’s deliberate and active support for homeownership tenure.

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex.

In How We Vote, Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore what is at the heart of our democracy: how elections are run. Election administration determines how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process, as well as how election officials work.

Election officials must work in a difficult intergovernmental environment of constant change and intense partisanship. Voting practices and funding vary from state to state, and multiple government agencies, the judicial system, voting equipment vendors, nonprofit groups, and citizen activists also influence practices and limit change. Despite real challenges and pessimistic media assessments, Hale and Brown demonstrate that election officials are largely successful in their work to facilitate, protect, and evolve the voting process.

Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future.

Latin America underwent two major transformations during the 2000s: the widespread election of left-leaning presidents (the so-called left turn) and the diffusion of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—innovative social programs that award regular stipends to poor families on the condition that their children attend school. Combining cross-national quantitative research covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research, Human Capital versus Basic Income: Ideology and Models for Anti-Poverty Programs in Latin America challenges the conventional wisdom that these two transformations were unrelated. In this book, author Fabián A. Borges demonstrates that this ideology greatly influenced both the adoption and design of CCTs.
 
There were two distinct models of CCTs: a “human capital” model based on means-tested targeting and strict enforcement of program conditions, exemplified by the program launched by Mexico’s right, and a more universalistic “basic income” model with more permissive enforcement of conditionality, exemplified by Brazil’s program under Lula. These two models then spread across the region. Whereas right and center governments, with assistance from international financial institutions, enacted CCTs based on the human capital model, the left, with assistance from Brazil, enacted CCTs based on the basic income model.
 
The existence of two distinct types of CCTs and their relation to ideology is supported by quantitative analyses covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research in three countries. Left-wing governments operate CCTs that cover more people and spend more on those programs than their center or right-wing counterparts. Beyond coverage, a subsequent analysis of the 10 national programs adopted after Lula’s embrace of CCTs confirms that program design—evaluated in terms of scope of the target population, strictness of conditionality enforcement, and stipend structure—is shaped by government ideology. This finding is then fleshed out through case studies of the political processes that culminated in the adoption of basic income CCTs by left-wing governments in Argentina and Bolivia and a human capital CCT by a centrist president in Costa Rica.