Children of refugees are among the most economically disadvantaged youth in several European countries. They are more likely to drop out of school and to commit crime. We show that a reform in Denmark in 1999, that expanded language training for adult refugees and improved their economic...

We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother's receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes. Using data from the matched mother-child file from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children's...

Economic research on the safety net has evolved significantly over time, moving away from a near exclusive focus on the negative incentive effects of means-tested assistance on employment, earnings, marriage and fertility to include examination of the potential positive benefits of such programs...

To study the effects of neighborhood and place-based interventions, this paper incorporates neighborhood effects into a general equilibrium (GE) heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model with endogenous location choice and child skill development. Importantly, housing costs as well as...

This paper examines the economic foundations of some recently proposed criteria for evaluating the benefits of social programs. These criteria are appropriate for comparing a class of revenue-constant policies. They replace foundational principles of social opportunity costs with accounting...

There is a well-established association between income and child health. We examine the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides cash assistance to low-income children with disabilities, to assess how this relationship arises. We use a large database of Medicaid administrative...

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed...

We assess evidence from randomized control trials (RCTs) on long-run economic productivity and living standards in poor countries. We first document that several studies estimate large positive long-run impacts, but that relatively few existing RCTs have been evaluated over the long-run. We next...

Low birth weight infants born to mothers with low educational attainment have a double hurdle to overcome in the production of human capital. We examine whether income transfers in the form of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments for children with disabilities can help close the gap in...