Australia's 'income management' policy requires benefit recipients to spend at least half of their government transfers on essentials (e.g. food, housing). We estimate income management's impact on birth outcomes by exploiting its staggered rollout. By changing parents' consumption patterns, the...

This paper considers the effect of child care costs on two labor market outcomes for single mothers - whether to participate in the labor market and whether to receive welfare. Hourly child care expenditures are estimated for all women in the sample (using data drawn from the 1992 and 1993...

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...

We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation and related economic outcomes using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968–2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at...

Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of welfare reform experiments suggesting that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. Using data on Connecticut's Jobs First experiment, we find no evidence of...