The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changesthat have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens withadequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on datafor 24 European Union countries,...

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...

This paper examines the differences in welfare, as measured by per capita expenditure (PCE), between social groups in rural India across the entire welfare distribution. The paper establishes that the disadvantage suffered by two historically disadvantaged groups - Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

This paper examines the case for randomized controlled trials in economics. I revisit my previous paper "Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation" and update its message. I present a brief summary of the history of randomization in economics. I identify two waves of enthusiasm for the method...

We show that a social planner who seeks to allocate a given sum in order to reduce efficiently the social stress of a population, as measured by the aggregate relative deprivation of the population, pursues a disbursement procedure that is identical to the procedure adhered to by a Rawlsian...

This paper evaluates the causal impacts of an early childhood home visiting program for which treatment is randomly assigned. We estimate multivariate latent skill profiles for individual children and compare treatments and controls. We identify average treatment effects of skills on performance...

This paper starts from a review of RCT studies in development economics, and documents many studies largely ignore attrition once attrition rates are found balanced between treatment arms. The paper analyzes the implications of attrition for the internal and external validity of the results of a...

On January 1st 1994 Portugal introduced, for the first time, inflation indexation in the old-age pension formula. This change considerably decreased the uncertainty regarding the perception of the link between the stream of labor earnings and future pensions. The effect of indexation was large...

Measures of subjective well-being have gained substantial attention in economics as quantitative approximations of individual welfare. They allow researchers to study relevant determinants of welfare on an individual as well as on a societal level. These determinants might not to be easily...

There is a burgeoning literature on the significance and distribution of wealth in the rich world. It mainly focuses on the top. Wealth remains remarkably absent from the analysis of poverty and the redistributive effectiveness of welfare systems. This paper shows that real and financial assets...