The paper evaluates the distributional effects on earnings and income of requiring young welfare recipients to fulfill conditions related to work and activation. It exploits within-social insurance office variation in policy arising from a geographically staggered reform in Norway. The reform...

This paper provides a clear and transparent setting to study the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decision. Using administrative pension insurance records from Germany, I examine the impact of a pension subsidy program to low pay workers, implemented in 1992. The...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. We relate the stylized fact to an "efficiency-redistribution" trade-off to be resolved by political process. The inefficiency of social security...

This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the outcomes of 10 and 11 year olds, controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family characteristics. The results suggest that limited amounts of work by mothers benefit youths who are relatively "disadvantaged" and even...

We study the causal effects of changes in parental leave provisions on fertility and return-to-work behavior. We exploit a policy change that took place in 1990 in Austria which extended the maximum duration of parental leave from the child's first to the child's second birthday. As parental...

In this paper we use linked census data to assess whether an academically selective schooling system promotes social mobility, using England as a case study. Over a period of two decades, the share of pupils in academically selective schools in England declined sharply and differentially by...

We use a difference-in-differences model with individual fixed effects to evaluate a 1999 Spanish law granting employment protection to workers with children younger than 6 who had asked for a shorter workweek due to family responsibilities. Our analysis shows that well- intended policies can...

Although there is evidence that apprenticeship training can ease the transition of youth into the labour market and thereby reduce youth unemployment, many policy makers fear that firms will cut their apprenticeship expenditures during economic crises, thus exacerbating the problem of youth...

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

We offer a new strategy to identify the distribution of treatment effects using data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), a relatively understudied early-childhood intervention for low birth-weight infants. We introduce a new policy parameter, QCD, which denotes quantiles of...