We study the design of parental leave systems through the lens of an estimated model of parents’ joint willingness to pay for parental leave. We estimate the model using Danish register data on almost 200,000 births combined with sharp variation in economic incentives created by the parental...

Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

This paper considers the potential impact of welfare benefits on the partnership status of women in the UK. Using recent policy reforms to identify the response rate I find that a GBP100/week welfare benefit "partnership penalty" reduces the probability of a woman having a partner by seven...

The goal of this research is to explore whether actual lottery revenues are sensitive to scarcity, as measured by intra-monthly variation in financial resources. Exogenous paydays of social security benefits are employed to generate the intra-monthly variation in financial resources. Using two...

We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration’s projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security schemes in the OECD countries are facing solvency problems, as people are living longer and birth rates have declined. Postponing the full retirement age (FRA), when retirees are entitled to full pension, has been proposed as a solution. This effectively...

How do parents contend with threats to the health and survival of their children? Can the social safety net mitigate negative economic effects through transfers to affected families? We study these questions by combining the universe of cancer diagnoses among Danish children with register data...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. Our key insight is that linking benefits to past earnings (less redistributiveness) reduces the efficiency cost of social security (due to endogenous...