In recent decades, a great deal of international comparative research has examined whether social policy crowds out or crowds in social trust. Although previous studies have made significant advances, we still have much to learn. First, the proxies of social policy adopted by earlier...

Can autocratic governments gain support by implementing a welfare reform and a repressive law? This paper studies a famous case - Bismarck's policies of social insurance and the antisocialist law in late 19th century Germany. The socialist party, I find, increases its vote share in...

Inspired by Fröhlich and Oppenheimer (1990), an experimental survey in the lab was designed to find out if preferences for three different redistribution schemes differ under a veil of ignorance. The three schemes are a stylized version of the status quo German welfare state (A), a control...

Based on administrative data, we analyze empirically the effects of stricter conditionality for social assistance receipt on welfare dependency and high school completion rates among Norwegian youths. Our evaluation strategy exploits a geographically differentiated implementation of...