This paper asks which sub-groups of the population are affected by the payment of a small cash incentive to respond to a telephone survey. We find that an incentive improves response rates primarily amongst those individuals with the longest history of income support receipt. Importantly, these...

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changesthat have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens withadequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on datafor 24 European Union countries,...

This study develops and estimates a model of the naturalization process in the US. The model is based on both the characteristics of immigrants and features of their countries of origin. The empirical analysis is based on the 2000 US Census...

One theory for why there is a strong education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new information about health technology. The MMR controversy in the UK provides a case where, for a brief period of time, some highly publicized research suggested...

Reforming pensions looms large over the policy agenda of OECD countries. This is hardlysurprising since public spending on pensions accounted on average for 7 per cent of OECDGDP in 2005; and this pension spending effort is set to increase significantly over the comingdecades in response to...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

The "common effect" model in program evaluation assumes that all treated individuals have the same impact from a program. Our paper contributes to the recent literature that tests and goes beyond the common effect model by investigating impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental...

This paper explores how cross-sectional data can be exploited jointly with longitudinal data,in order to increase estimation efficiency while properly tackling the potential bias due tounobserved individual characteristics. We propose an innovative procedure and we show itsimplementation by...

Many aspects of the economic transition which started in 1989 in Poland are by nowcomplete. However, the route Polish governments have so far taken concerning the systemof support for low-income families still implies very different poverty alleviation schemescompared to those found in many...

This paper uses British panel data to investigate single women´s labour supply changes inresponse to three tax and benefit policy reforms that occurred in the 1990s. These reformschanged individuals´ work incentives and we use them to identify changes in labour supply.We find evidence of small...