We exploit a panel of city-level data with rich demographic information to estimate the distributional effects of Department of Defense spending and its effects on a range of social outcomes. The income generated by defense spending accrues predominantly to households without a bachelor's...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000 - 2001, a randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

Cross-country differences in both the age at first birth and fertility are substantial in Europe. The paper uses the European Community Household Panel 1994-2000 to investigate the relationship between unemployment of both women (and their spouses) with the timing and number of children....

We exploit the exogenous change in marginal tax rates created by the Russian flat tax reform of 2001 to identify the effect of taxes on labor supply of males and females. We apply the weighted difference-in-difference regression approach and instrumental variables to the labor supply function...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a ?couples-based? policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in which...

The present paper analyzes the budgetary impact of various Social Security reforms in the Belgian institutional setting. Our approach relies on parameters that were derived in Dellis et alii (2002) using a micro-modeling strategy. Focusing our attention on a hypothetical age cohort, we...

The consequences of business cycle contingencies in unemployment insurance systems are considered in a search-matching model allowing for shifts between good and bad states of nature. We show that not only is there an insurance argument for such contingencies, but there may also be an incentive...

We provide new evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight control (i.e. weight loss or avoidance of weight gain). We utilize nationally representative data that provide the most direct evidence to date on this question: individuals are...

We estimate the crowding out of private transfers caused by 70 y Más - a public assistance program for the rural elderly in Mexico for whom family support is an important source of income. Using data from the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey and a triple difference approach, we find that...

This paper provides an overview of the main findings of the book Social Insurance and Labor Markets: How to Protect Workers While Creating New Jobs. The book conceptualizes and reviews the empirical evidence on the potential distortions that the social insurance system of a country can have on...