Age in the Welfare State

Julia Lynch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent dissertation, on which this book is based, garnered the Gabriel Almond prize of the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in comparative politics. Professor Lynch was previously a scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholars program at Harvard University, and she has been a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence and the Luxembourg Income Study project in Luxembourg

• 1. Introduction; 2. Measuring the age of welfare; 3. Age and the welfare state: theories and hypotheses; 4. Family allowances: wages, taxes, and the appeal to the self-employed; 5. Benefits for the unemployed: young and old in the fortress labor market; 6. Old-age pensions: the architecture of spending; 7. Conclusion.

'Julia Lynch has made an unusually creative and insightful contribution to comparative social policy theory. The great virtue of Age in the Welfare State is that it succeeds in answering all three of its major research questions in a robust, systematic, and thought-provoking way.' Pieter Vanhuysse, University of Haifa