It is today generally acknowledged that social norms are important for moral hazard in social insurance systems. In this paper we study whether local variation in sickness absence can be explained by local variation in norms concerning benefit dependency – formed by social interaction on the neighborhood level. A well known methodological problem in analyses of this issue is how to disentangle ...

This paper uses a reform in Illinois that reduced the monthly subsidy offered to relatives asked to provide foster care as a plausibly exogenous change in the cost of caring for related children. Families offered a 30% lower wage were 15% less likely to provide care, with especially large declines for children who require mental health services, infants and teenagers. One innovation is a sample...

Charitable giving has increasingly become ‘tough love’ it has come to require recipients to undertake costly prior action. A common justification is that of greater efficiency: willingness to undertake costly actions signals greater productivity from transfers. However, there is a trade-off. Conditions impose a cost, since the activities required are by themselves welfare reducing for at least ...

We study whether a sudden increase of the price of rice supplied by the Indian Public Distribution System in Andhra Pradesh, a large Indian state, had a negative impact on child nutrition. A few months after the price increase, a health survey started to record weight for a large sample of children. The data collection continued for several months, so that children measured later lived for a lo...

Does poverty lead to crime? We shed light on this question using two independent and exogenous shocks to household income in rural India: the dramatic reduction in import tariffs in the early 1990s and rainfall variations. We find that trade shocks, previously shown to raise relative poverty, also increased the incidence of violent crimes and property crimes. The relationship between trade shoc...

Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program’s effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lastin...

Minimum income schemes aim at providing citizens with a minimum living standard. In some EU countries, their regulation and provision takes place the subnational level. This is case in Spain, where are heterogeneous complex collection of regional benefits designed implemented level, by Autonomous Communities. June 2020, complementary nationwide scheme was implemented. this context, we use Europ...

This paper focuses on the macro-economic impacts of changes in health provision via its effects on the labour market. The resource allocation issues have been explored in theory, by further developing the Rybczynski theorem and empirically, using a Computable General Equilibrium model for the UK. From the theory, changes in non-health outputs are shown to depend on socalled factor-bias and scal...

This paper analyzes the incentive eff ects of affi rmative action in competitive environments modeled as contest games. Competition is between heterogeneous players where heterogeneity might be due to past discrimination. Two policy options are analyzed that tackle the underlying asymmetry: Either it is ignored and the contestants are treated equally, or affi rmative action is implemented which...

I consider the popular argument of Medicaid crowding out demand for private long-term care insurance. I show that this argument rests on a wrong counterfactual comparison. Furthermore, I question the welfare-decreasing impact of Medicaid as it neglects a large value of the program in providing access to care. I show that private insurance is unable to o er a similar value. I posit that the low ...