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...

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...

We apply German Mikrozensus data for the period 1996 to 2004 to investigate the employment status of mothers. Specifically, we ask whether there are behavioral differences between mothers in East and West Germany, whether these differences disappear over time, and whether there are differences...

Addressing extensive labour supply responses, the literature has established a case for larger transfers to the working poor than to even poorer non-working people. This paper casts new light on this result. I argue that the result hinges crucially on the labour supply responses of people in...

Many community organizations provide services similar to government programs, but there is limited evidence how increased government assistance affects the use of charitable services. We examine how greater access to federal nutritional aid through schoolwide free meal programs affects food bank...

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...

Transfers from parents - either in the form of gifts or inheritances - have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the...

This paper studies the design of couples' income taxation. Consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made by maximizing a weighted sum of the spouses’ utilities; bargaining weights are given but specific to each couple. The information structure and labor supply decisions...

This paper studies the mechanisms and the extent to which parental wage risk passes through to children's skill development. Through a quantitative dynamic labor supply model in which two parents choose whether to work short or long hours or not work at all, time spent with children, and...