This paper evaluates the heterogeneous effect of health insurance on out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE), using merged data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey and Ghana Health Service reports. It applies conditional-mixed process and censored quantile instrumental variable...

Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...

While rising unemployment generally reduces people's happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study, however, rejects this thesis for German panel data...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people's well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans' well-being...

In developing societies, social norms typically ascribe differential weights to paternal, maternal and communal (or state) contributions to children’s expenses. Individuals internalize these valuations. I examine a Cournot model of voluntary contribution to children’s goods in a twoadult...

We draw some lessons from the Tunisian experience of social reforms and associated civil conflict. Our main interest is the riots that occurred after subsidy cuts and their possible substitution of price subsidies by direct cash transfers. We propose new welfare indicators apt to assess policy...

We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married...

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...

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...

The German Child Benefit ("Kindergeld") is paid to legal guardians of children as a cash benefit. This study employs exogenous variations in the amount of child benefit received by households to investigate the extent to which these various changes have translated into an improvement in the...