There has been little empirical work evaluating the sensitivity of fertility to financial incentives at the household level. We put forward an identification strategy that relies on the fact that variation of wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among "comparable households. We...

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and family well-being. I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a new, sizeable, unconditional child benefit in Spain in 2007, granted to all mothers giving birth on or after July 1, 2007. The regression discontinuity-type design...

This paper uses two large multi-country datasets on educational scores – PISA and TIMSS – to examine the performance of Russia in comparative light as well as the factors associated with differences in educational outcomes in Russia. Despite the perception of a positive educational legacy,...

This paper provides a novel justification for using a minimum wage to supplement an optimal tax-and-transfer system. We demonstrate that if labor supply decisions are concentrated along the intensive margin and employment is efficiently rationed, a minimum wage can be socially beneficial by...

Mobility of highly-skilled workers affects and is affected by labor market conditions, taxes, and other policies. This paper documents the demographic and fiscal importance of international migration, especially in aging societies, reviews the efficiency and distributional effects of mobility,...

We study the role and design of private and public insurance programs when informal care is uncertain. Children's degree of altruism is randomly distributed over some interval. Social insurance helps parents who receive a low level of care, but it comes at the cost of crowding out informal care....

Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. This paper estimates a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity in Austrian administrative data. A search model...

This paper studies the political economy of a basic income (BI) versus a means tested welfare scheme. We show in a very simple setting that if society votes on the type of system, its generosity as well as the "severity" of means testing (if any), a BI system could only emerge in the political...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention the Street Crime Initiative that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources...

This paper aims to shed light on the role of the 'ideology' of political parties in shaping the evolution of the welfare state in 18 developed democracies, by providing empirical findings on the determinants of social programs entitlements and social spending over the period 1981-1999. The paper...