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...

Social assistance in Germany reduces the incentive to work. TheU. S. Welfare to Work Programme tries to avoid such disincentives. It consists essentially of two elements: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for employees in low wage occupations and a Workfare model. The EITC and the Workfare...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the nonpecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions – the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

Recent literature on long-term care looks at the substitutability of informal and professional home-based care arrangements. Other factors that influence the utilization of informal care instead of formal care have been ignored in conditional analyses so far. However, regressors that represent...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

We study state dependence in welfare receipt and investigate whether welfare transitions changed after a welfare reform. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we apply dynamic multinomial logit estimators and find that state dependence in welfare receipt is not a central feature of...