This paper studies the effects of day care exposure on behavioral disorders and mental and physical health at various ages during childhood. We draw on a unique set of merged population register data from Sweden over the period 1999-2008. This includes merged information at the individual level from the inpatient...
Basic sanitation facilities are still lacking in large parts of the developing world, engendering serious environmental health risks. Interventions commonly deliver in-kind or cash subsidies to promote private toilet ownership. In this paper, we assess an intervention that provides information and behavioral incentives to encourage villagers in rural Mali to...
In this study, we document the effect of Food Stamp access on adult health care utilization. While Food Stamps is one of the largest safety net programs in the U.S. today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental analysis. To...
Expanding insurance coverage could, by insulating patients from having to pay full cost, encourage the utilization of arguably unnecessary medical services. It could also eliminate (or at least diminish) the need for emergency services through increasing access to preventive care. Using publicly available data from New York City for the...
This paper analyses the impact of the business cycle on labour market dynamics in EU member states and the US during the first decade of the 21st century. Using unique measures of labour market flows constructed from worker-level micro data, we examine to what extent macro shocks were transmitted to...
In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work, labour market participation, inequality and welfare in Germany. Unemployment fell because the Hartz IV reform induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers and appear as non-participants. Yet, labour force...
We develop an OLG model with realistic assumptions about longevity to analyze the welfare effects of raising the retirement age. We look at a scenario where an economy has a pay-as-you-go defined benefit scheme and compare it to a scenario with defined contribution schemes (funded or notional). We show that,...
This paper assesses the effect of key demographic changes (population ageing and upskilling) that are expected by 2030 on the income distribution in the EU-27 and examines the potential of tax-benefit systems to counterbalance negative developments. Theory predicts that population ageing should increase income inequality, while the effect of up-skilling...
The Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and how well tax-benefit systems redistribute. We examine how the distribution of income in the EU countries which were hardest hit during the recession evolved over this time. Using and extending a recently developed...
This paper investigates the impact of remittances on poverty and inequality in Nigeria. In contrast to the existing literature, our methodology of instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) explicitly demonstrates the differential marginal impact of remittances for households at different levels of the conditional expenditure distribution. Furthermore, in tracing this heterogeneous...
Despite growing academic and policy interest in the subjective well-being consequences of emigration for those left behind, existing studies have focused on single origin countries or specific world regions. Our study is the first to offer a global perspective on the well-being consequences of emigration for those staying behind using...
We consider a model where each individual (or ethnic minority) is embedded in a network of relation-ships and decides whether or not she wants to be assimilated to the majority norm. Each individual wants her behavior to agree with her personal ideal action or norm but also wants her behavior...
We examine the impact of rainfall variability and cyclones on schooling and work among a cohort of teens and young adults by estimating a bivariate probit model, using a panel survey conducted in 2004 and 2011 in Madagascar − a poor island nation that is frequently affected by extreme weather...
Matching archive data on election discontinuities to register data on labor market trajectories we estimate the causal effects of being elected into Swedish student union councils on subsequent labor market careers. Marginally elected students are much more likely to have a rapid transition into employment. Effects are not confined to...
We estimate a structural model of education choices in which individuals choose between a professional (or technical) and a general track at both high school and university levels using French panel data (Génération 98). The average per-period utility of attending general high school (about 10,000 euros per year) is 20%...
This paper estimates the effect of exposure to teacher pay-for-performance programs on adult outcomes. We construct a comprehensive data set of schools which have implemented teacher performance pay programs across the United States since 1986, and use our data to calculate the fraction of students by race in each grade...
This paper investigates the relationship between partner's mental health and individual life satisfaction, using a sample of married and cohabitating couples from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey (HILDA). We use panel data models with fixed effects to estimate the life satisfaction impact of several different measures...
The article reports an analysis of the findings of a search for household budget surveys for Latin America for the period from the earliest surveys to the late 1960s. Over one hundred studies were located. References to these surveys are available at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/globalincomeinequality/. In Appendix 1 we offer a synopsis...
We trace the development of the household expenditure survey from its conception during the Napoleonic Wars until the 1960s. We have compiled the first historical bibliography of household budget surveys in Western Europe and, using the surveys themselves as source material, have traced the development of their practice and methodology....
We investigate the impacts of trade liberalization on household behaviors and outcomes in urban China, exploiting regional variation in the exposure to tariff cuts resulting from WTO entry. Regions that initially specialized in industries facing larger tariff cuts experienced relative declines in wages. Households responded to this income shock in...