There is a heated debate in the US and Canada, as well as in many European countries, about a move towards subsidized, universally accessible child care. At the same time, studies on universal child care and child development are scarce, limited to short-run outcomes, and the findings are mixed....

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

We assess the case for universal child care programs in the context of a Norwegian reform which led to a large-scale expansion of subsidized child care. We use non-linear difference-in-differences methods to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the reform. We find that the effects of the...

Theory and evidence points towards particularly positive effects of high-quality child care for disadvantaged children. At the same time, disadvantaged families often sort out of existing programs. To counter differences in learning outcomes between children from different socioeconomic...

Young children are thought to be vulnerable to separation from the primary caregiver/s. This raises concern about whether early child care enrollment may harm children's development. We use child care assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of child care starting age on early cognitive...

We study the impact of child care for toddlers on the labor supply of mothers and fathers in Norway. For identification, we exploit the staggered expansion across municipalities following a large reform from 2002. Our IV-estimates indicate that child care use causes an increase in the labor...

The standard practice in most OECD countries is to measure and evaluate poverty on the basis of a poverty line defined as a specific proportion of the median equivalent income within a country. However, this approach disregards regional differences in prices and needs within a country and may,...

As an alternative to the conventional methods for measuring chronic poverty, this paper proposes an interpersonal comparable measure of permanent income as a basis for defining and measuring chronic poverty. This approach accounts for the fact that individuals regularly undertake inter-period...

The standard approach in empirical analyses of income distributions is to estimate income inequality in a country under the assumption of full interpersonal comparability of income. To be meaningful, this method requires that prices and qualities of goods as well as consumption habits are...

The generous Nordic model of welfare is commonly viewed as an exceptional success both in terms of equality and economic growth. However, it has recently become evident that subgroups of the population with weak labour market attachment and high welfare dependency, such as lone mothers, were...