This paper investigates whether mandatory activation programs for welfare receivers have effects on welfare participation, employment and disposable income. In contrast to earlier studies we are able to capture both entry and exit effects. The empirical analysis makes use of a Swedish welfare...

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

This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to...

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 identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program eligibility is a...

This paper assesses the role of risk constraints in households' production decisions. Using representative panel data for Andhra Pradesh, India, it analyses the effects of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on households' crop choices. This paper shows that the introduction...

We exploit the 1996 reform of the German child benefit program to identify the causal effect of heterogeneous child benefits on fertility. While generally the reform increased child benefits, the exact amount of the increase varied substantially by household income and sibship size. We use these...

This paper examines the impact of Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 mandated citizenship verification requirements on the Medicaid coverage of children using state administrative data from Georgia. Our analysis focuses on children enrolled in Medicaid prior to the reform in the eligibility category...

This paper estimates the impact of the introduction of Medicaid managed care (MMC) on the formal Medicaid participation of children. We employ a quasi-experimental approach exploiting the location-specific timing of MMC implementation in Kentucky. Using data from the March Current Population...

We study the intergenerational transmission of welfare benefit receipt in Germany. We first describe the correlation between welfare receipt experienced in the parental household and subsequent own welfare receipt of young adults. In a second step, we investigate whether the observed...