How do firms adjust their labor demand when a female employee takes temporary leave after childbirth? Using Austrian administrative data, we compare firms with and without a birth event and exploit policy reforms that significantly altered leave durations. We find that (i) firms adjust hiring,...

We ran a large randomized controlled experiment among about 150,000 recipients of unemployment benefits insurance in France in order to evaluate the impact of part-time unemployment benefits. We took advantage of the lack of knowledge of job seekers regarding this program and sent emails...

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and family well-being. I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a new, sizeable, unconditional child benefit in Spain in 2007, granted to all mothers giving birth on or after July 1, 2007. The regression discontinuity-type design...

In this paper we challenge the conventional wisdom that using workfare as a supplementary screening device to means-testing is socially undesirable when the overnment objective is welfarist, namely, to ensure that all members of society will attain some minimal level of utility. Our argument...

This paper uses two large multi-country datasets on educational scores PISA and TIMSS to examine the performance of Russia in comparative light as well as the factors associated with differences in educational outcomes in Russia. Despite the perception of a positive educational legacy, Russian...

The recovery from the Covid-19 crisis will force governments to accelerate transformation in their menu of labor market policy tools. The crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudden and unexpected shutdown of a very large set of activities. This forced...

Good public policy needs to be evidence based. However, the evidence base is thin for many policy issues. How can policy makers best respond to such thin areas of research that are also quite likely to change over time? Our survey investigates the evolution of the econometric evidence base for...

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance and disability...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention the Street Crime Initiative that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources...

This paper aims to shed light on the role of the 'ideology' of political parties in shaping the evolution of the welfare state in 18 developed democracies, by providing empirical findings on the determinants of social programs entitlements and social spending over the period 1981-1999. The paper...