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...

In the simple Allingham-Sandmo portfolio model of tax evasion an expected utility maximizer will cheat more than what is estimated in empirical studies. Two main types of explanation have been suggested as solutions to this puzzle: (1) Tax payers act according to some non-expected utility...

Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone...

Norwegian parents of preschool children make their care choices from a completely different choice set compared to what their predecessor did, say, two decades ago. Now, there is essentially only one type of nonparental care, center-based care, and at the parental side fathers take a more...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and de-escalation. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of conflict. Second,...

This paper conducts a comprehensive study of patent citations in patents granted to Belgian corporate applicants by the United States and the European Patent Offices using qualitative response variable analysis. The analysis uncovered different patterns of citations in patents, which belong to...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) maintains networks of pollution monitors for two basic purposes: to check and enforce the attainment of national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) and to provide useful data for studying pollution and its effects. These purposes imply...

In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed in the nineties by Oswald, Clark, Blanchflower and others with the older income evaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in the seventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield...

This paper estimates the preference scores of CoCo bond buyers and sellers by running logistic regressions taking into account both bond and issuing bank's characteristics, and also considers the role of country−specific CoCo bond market competitiveness. Buyers are found to be characterised by...