The non take-up of social assistance benefits due to claim costs may seriously limit the anti-poverty effect of these programs. Yet, available evidence is fragmented and mostly relies on interview-based data, potentially biased by misreporting and measurement errors on both benefit entitlement...

We develop a nonparametric instrumental variable approach for the estimation of average treatment effects on hazard rates and conditional survival probabilities, without model structure.We derive constructive identification proofs for average treatment effects under noncompliance and dynamic...

There is a well-established socioeconomic gradient in cognitive test scores for children. This gradient emerges at very early ages and there is also some evidence that it can widen as children age. We investigate this phenomenon with two longitudinal cohorts of Irish children who take such tests...

Administrative burdens may deepen inequality by creating costly experiences for vulnerable groups. Research to date typically focuses on how burdens affect decisions in specific policy contexts, thus little is known about everyday experiences of burdens and their distribution in society. This is...

Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary choice...

Welfare caseloads in North America halved following reforms in the 1990s and 2000s. We study how this shift affected families by linking Canadian welfare records to tax returns, medical spending, educational attainment, and crime data. We find substantial and heterogeneous employment responses...

The main objectives of social assistance benefits, including poverty alleviation and labor-market or social reintegration, can be seriously compromised if support is difficult to access. While recent studies point to high non-take-up rates, existing evidence does not make full use of the...

This paper examines married women's time allocation to market hours and spousal care in the event of their husbands' disability and its implications for evaluating the insurance value of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. First, I find that while spousal labor supply...