Integration agreements (IA) outline the efforts the jobseeker should undertake to find employment and specify the services that the caseworker would provide to assist them in their job search. The agreements include a declaration of legal consequences, and punitive benefit sanctions could be...

We study the labor market and mental health impacts of debt relief among financially vulnerable individuals. We exploit a cutoff rule used by a Dutch welfare office to determine eligibility to debt relief of welfare debts. We use this cutoff as an instrument in both a fuzzy regression...

While it is well established that welfare bureaucrats hold some discretionary power in implementing welfare policies, scholars of the administrative burden concept have only recently begun to consider their individual impacts on welfare recipients' experiences of onerous state encounters. This...

This study examines the impact of caseworker beliefs on employment and health outcomes among long-term unemployed social assistance recipients in Denmark. Exploiting as-if random caseworker assignment, an instrumental variables approach, and a novel measure of "Caseworker Job Orientation", we...

One challenge presented by population aging is how to adjust public support for social care in a way that achieves desired quality of life outcomes without compromising budget sustainability. This study uses best-practice methods of economic analysis to explore projections for care and related...

Purpose - Health shocks are among the factors that have impeded households from experiencing better welfare. To mitigate the consequences of these shocks, individuals have sought to enrol in a formal insurance scheme or borrow from banks. This study estimates the effects of health shocks on...

This study examines how SNAP participation may affect age-related cognitive decline among cognitively intact older adults over 10 years. Leveraging a longitudinal survey of SNAP-eligible participants in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) collected biennially from 2010 to 2020, we estimate the...

This study examines how SNAP participation may affect age-related cognitive decline among cognitively intact older adults over 10 years. Leveraging a longitudinal survey of SNAP-eligible participants in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) collected biennially from 2010 to 2020, we estimate the...

This paper uses register-based data to analyze the consequences of a recent major Danish welfare reform for children’s academic performance and well-being. In addition to work requirements, the reform brought about considerable reductions in welfare transfers. We implement a comparative event...

This paper studies the effects of a supported work program that provides TANF recipients with a suite of services including a six-month subsidized internship with a local employer. We use rich administrative data and implement a stacked difference-in-differences design comparing program...

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...

Background The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010, aimed to improve healthcare coverage for American citizens. This study investigates the impact of Medicaid expansion (ME) under the ACA on the racial and ethnic com- position of nursing home admissions in the U.S., focusing on whether ME...

Take-up of social benefits is a central issue in poverty alleviation and fiscal evaluations of policy reforms. However, it is difficult to find exogenous variation in the benefit level, and little is therefore known about take-up responses to basic financial incentives. We exploit large and...

While a large literature examines the immediate and long-run effects of public health insurance, much less is known about the impacts of total program exposure on child developmental outcomes. This paper uses an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the effect of cumulative eligibility gain...

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the backbone of the U.S. safety net. We provide the most comprehensive and generalizable evaluation of the labor supply effects of access to modern SNAP to date. To do so we use new, rich administrative data and an examiner design based on...

Use of public assistance by noncitizens is controversial. Before 2018, institutionalization and receipt of cash benefits were considered as evidence of whether immigrants were likely to become a "public charge" and, therefore, ineligible for citizenship. But a new rule-proposed in 2018 and...

Integration agreements (IA) outline the efforts the jobseeker should undertake to find employment and specify the services that the caseworker would provide to assist them in their job search. The agreements include a declaration of legal consequences, and punitive benefit sanctions could be...

We examine whether increases in Medicaid coverage among teens reduced suicide risk. Youth are at elevated risk for depression but receive the least care. We exploit state-level variation in Medicaid coverage controlling for crowd-out to identify effects on risk for suicide. We build an...

Public insurance may disincentivize marriage, but for whom? Using the American Community Survey, we find that an increased likelihood of Medicaid eligibility owing to the Affordable Care Act reduces marriage rates, particularly among people with higher education levels. We develop a search model...

How does the expectation of aid change behavior? We propose a simple approach to separate expectations effects from the direct effects of relaxing resource constraints: compare the promise of a program to the program itself. We test this approach in a four-arm randomized controlled trial of cash...

We document state variation in Medicaid coverage for obesity-indicated GLP-1 medications over time, and use a stacked difference-in-differences design to estimate the effects of coverage on utilization and net-of-rebate spending. Nine quarters out, coverage increases prescriptions for...

We study the labor market and mental health impacts of debt relief among financially vulnerable individuals. We exploit a cutoff rule used by a Dutch welfare office to determine eligibility to debt relief of welfare debts. We use this cutoff as an instrument in both a fuzzy regression...

This paper assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get credited into their accounts. Using...

We estimate the causal impact of access to means-tested public health insurance coverage (Medicaid) on health outcomes and recidivism for those recently released from incarceration. To do so, we leverage a policy change in South Carolina that allowed simplified Medicaid re-enrollment for...