This paper exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of child's access to public health insurance on labor market outcomes of parents. The results imply that extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to...

In the early 2000s, Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont expanded Medicaid to cover more low-income individuals, primarily childless adults. This change provides the researcher with an opportunity to analyze the effects of these expansions on labor supply and welfare...

Previous work suggests that Medicaid eligibility expansions may lead to declines in labor market activity. This paper explores the related, but novel question of whether variation in Medicaid benefit generosity alters employment outcomes. We consider adult vision benefits as a case study. Our...

The Medicaid expansions and health insurance subsidies of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) change work incentives for single mothers. To evaluate the employment effects of these policies ex ante, I estimate a model of labor supply and health insurance choice exploiting variation in pre-ACA Medicaid...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences...

Similar to numerous other European countries, Germany's unemployment policy went through a paradigm shift in 2005, towards activation policy by tightening their monitoring and sanction regime. With our study, we aim to provide causal evidence for whether an intended positive effect of benefit...

An essential difference between the design of the Swedish and the US in-work tax credit systems relates to their functional forms. Where the US earned income tax credit (EITC) is phased out and favours low and medium earnings, the Swedish system is not phased out and offers 17 and 7 per cent tax...

In Germany, imposition of benefit cuts for non-compliant welfare recipients depends on the policy of the local welfare agencies resulting in considerable regional variation, expressed in milder and stricter sanction regimes. Findings from international studies show, that benefit sanctions can...

In this paper, we calculate the disposable incomes in 2012 of three selected family types receiving social assistance in five countries in north-western Europe. We also calculate the net replacement rates for families receiving social assistance, calculated on the basis of the disposable incomes...

Activation policies to promote self-sufficiency among recipients of welfare and other types of benefits are becoming more common in many welfare states. We evaluate a law change in Norway making welfare receipt conditional on participation in an activation program for all welfare recipients...