We present the results from a natural experiment in which single mothers on welfare were stimulated to find a job. Two policy instruments were introduced: an earnings disregard and job creation. The experiment was performed at the level of municipalities in The Netherlands, a country with...

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data...

Economic theory predicts that adverse shocks during early childhood have detrimental short- and long-run consequences for children’s development. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing the short-and long-run effects on children’s health and education of a specific shock: housing damages...

Health care financing and funding are usually analyzed in isolation. This paper combines the corresponding strands of the literature and thereby advances our understanding of the important interaction between them. We investigate the impact of three modes of health care financing, namely,...

Research has shown that birthweight has a lasting impact on later-life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. This paper examines the role of health at birth in determining academic achievement in childhood, which may provide the link between birthweight and adult outcomes. Using...

This paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. Unlike earlier work, we also take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and health estimates and report the confidence intervals for...

So-called activation policies aiming at bringing jobless people into work have been a central component of welfare reforms across OECD countries during the last decades. Such policies combine restrictive and enabling programs, but their characteristic feature is that also enabling programs are...

We show that a transfer targeting a minority of the population is sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the probability to receive the transfer is decreasing and concave in income. We apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that...

Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...