This paper analyzes the effects of Denmark's Start Aid welfare reform that targets refugees. Implemented in 2002, it enables us to study not only the reform's immediate effects, but also its longer-term consequences, and its repeal a decade later. The reform-induced large transfer cuts led to an...

In most Western economies, the flourishing of the Welfare State has coincided with a decline of the role of the family: divorce has been introduced, and the number of marriages has decreased. We suggest that a taboo against divorce was part of the informal safety net in a period when social...

Does the supply of a welfare state create its own demand? Many economic scholars studying welfare arrangements refer to Say's law and insinuate a self-destructive welfare state. However, little is known about the empirical validity of these assumptions and hypotheses. We study the dynamic effect...

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

Germany is in a dilemma. Low wage competition via product and factor markets increases the demands on the welfare state, but increased systems competition in the context of international factor mobility reduces the possibilities of maintaining it. The welfare state has important allocative...

Using a laboratory experiment, we present first evidence that stigmatization through public exposure causally reduces the take-up of an individually beneficial transfer. Our design exogenously varies the informativeness of the take-up decision by varying whether transfer eligibility is based on...

Recent theoretical work shows that precautionary savings increase in response to an increase in first-order risk. In addition, it is known that the welfare state, being an insurance or consumption-smoothing mechanism, reduces the negative welfare effect of future income uncertainty. We build a...

The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous bene.ts than otherwise. We...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...