It has been long recognized that cash plays a critical role in fueling street crime due to its liquidity and transactional anonymity. In poor neighborhoods where street offenses are concentrated, a significant source of circulating cash stems from public assistance or welfare payments. In the...

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of...

This study investigates the relationship between social vulnerability, illegal activities, and location-based business disruptions in Athens, the capital of Greece. The research utilises repeated cross-sectional data from 2008, 2014, and 2023, gathered from areas with high levels of criminal...

This paper examines how a change in the generosity of one social assistance program generates spillovers onto other social assistance programs. We exploit an age discontinuity in the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to estimate the causal effect of exit from disability insurance...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in using public-works programs as anti-poverty measures in developing countries. This paper analyzes the rural labor market impacts of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind, by using a...

This paper measures the causal effect of time out of the labor force on subsequent employment of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants and distinguishes it from the discouragement effect of receiving disability benefits. Using a unique Social Security Administration workload...

Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was a UK government cash transfer paid directly to children aged 16-18, in the first two years of post-compulsory full-time education. This paper uses the labour supply effect of EMA to infer the magnitude of the transfer response made by the parent, and so...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

In most disability insurance programs beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. We develop a simple...

Using an original administrative dataset in the context of a scarcity induced-natural experi-ment in New York City, I find that families placed in shelters in their neighborhoods of origin remain there considerably longer than those assigned to distant shelters. Locally-placed families also...