We consider what we call the Sheriff of Nottingham hypothesis : that the government of Brazil, which at the same time is party to litigated cases and the enforcer of tax laws, constantly enacts norms that seek to strengthen its side. We test this hypothesis and observe that litigants adapt to...

Standard economic analyses suggests that when the budget for redistribution is fixed, transfers should be targeted to (that is, means-tested for) those most in need. But both economists and political scientists have long recognized the possibility that targeting could undermine political support...

Standard economic analysis suggests that when the budget for redistribution is fixed, income transfers should be targeted to (i.e. means-tested for) those most in need. However, both political scientists and economists long have recognized the possibility that targeting might undermine political...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First...

The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage. The pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

Relatively little is known about the impact of welfare reform on children's living arrangements, which was an important focus of reformers. We use data from the March CPS to examine this question. Our findings suggest three main conclusions. First, welfare reform in some cases has had large...

In this article we propose a variance estimator for the OLS estimator as well as for nonlinear estimators such as logit, probit, and GMM. This variance estimator enables cluster-robust inference when there is two-way or multiway clustering that is nonnested. The variance estimator extends the...