We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identi ed using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program eligibility is a...

This paper provides evidence on the long run relationship between European settlers presence and education levels in Algeria. To correct for endogenous sorting of settlers (and natives) into regions I rely on the fact that proximity to the Mediteranean coast determined the timing of conquest and...

Women account for the majority of parental leave take-up, which is likely one of the major reasons for the gender gap in income and wages. Consequently, many countries exert effort to promote a more gender equal division of parental leave. Indeed, the last decades have seen an increase in...

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women’s political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment—a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups—to examine...

This paper summarizes a set of expert reports commissioned by the IFAU. The expert reports cover Estonia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These countries represent range of welfare states, both in terms of scope and design. And in each country there are...

We study the effects of performance bonuses in immigrant language training for adults. A Swedish policy pilot conducted in 2009–2010 gave a randomly assigned group of municipalities the right to grant substantial cash bonuses to recently arrived migrants. The results suggest substantial...

We study the effects of performance bonuses in immigrant language training for adults. A Swedish policy pilot conducted in 2009–2010 gave a randomly assigned group of municipalities the right to grant substantial cash bonuses to recently arrived migrants. The results suggest substantial...

The paper discusses which redistributional policies are efficient when the identity of the high and low skill persons is private information. Our major purpose is to identify the more efficient policy when, presumably for administrative reasons, the policy option is confined to the choice...

Previous literature shows that activation requirements for welfare participants decrease welfare participation. However, the dynamics have not been examined, and often only exit eects are analyzed. In this paper, we look more closely at the transition rates into and out of welfare. Using...

We investigate the effects on health at birth of a shock generated by a major (25%) and unexpected wage cut austerity measure that affected all public sector employees in Romania in 2010. Our findings suggest an overall improvement in health at birth for boys exposed to the shock in early...