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...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...

This paper addresses empirically determinants of individual support for the Welfare State. We examine the interrelation of informal institutions with the perceived quality of a country's institutional framework. As a proxy for informal institutions, we concentrate on three core beliefs (trust in...