This paper analyses differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in Sweden using a large panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996. Both welfare expenditures and immigration increased substantially in Sweden in the 1990's. We find that immigrants use welfare to a...

This Paper analyses transitions into and out of three different labour market states: social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish...

In the last 20 years, developed countries have struggled with what seemed to be an ever-rising tide of asylum seekers, a trend that has now gone into reverse. This paper examines what happened and why. How have oppression, violence and economic conditions in origin countries shaped worldwide...

We consider a search-matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs. Location choices are mainly driven by the racial preferences of households. There are two possible urban...

We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...

The share of immigrants in the German social assistance program exceeds their population share and continues to grow. This study evaluates the causes of this phenomenon and tests for the effects of assimilation, cohort, age at migration, and country of origin on immigrant behaviour. It uses...

The single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) register in Hungary is not by getting a job but by exhausting entitlement to benefit. Two questions follow. First, what are the implications of the cessation of UI for living standards? Second, does UI exhaustion have much...

Despite increasingly large scale social protection programs in Africa, we have limited evidence on the local political economy of their allocation. We investigate community-based processes for food aid allocation and the role of political and social networks, using the case of Ethiopia in the...

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statistics on the universe of births in Uruguay, we estimate that participation in...

We show that a transfer targeting a minority of the population is sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the probability to receive the transfer is decreasing and concave in income. We apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that...