Family Welfare Cultures

The receipt of disability insurance (DI) by one generation may well cause increased participation in the next generation. Gordon B. Dahl, together with Andreas Kostol and Magne Mogstad, examined this phenomenon for Norway. To overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations, the researchers took advantage of random assignment of judges to DI applicants whose cases are initially denied. Some appeal judges are systematically more lenient, which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed DI. Using this exogenous variation, Mr Dahl and his collaborators found strong evidence for a causal link across generations: when a parent is allowed DI at the appeal stage, their adult child's participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points. This finding suggest that welfare reforms can have long-lasting effects on programme participation, since any original effect on the current generation can be reinforced by changing the behaviour of their children as well.

This is Gordon Dahl's first visit to CESifo, and he looks forward to getting to know the affiliated researchers better and explore possible future collaborations. Mr Dahl's research interests are in labour economics and applied microeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from the effect of income on child achievement, to peer effects among coworkers and family members, to the determinants of family violence and to applied econometrics. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Review of Economic Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Gordon Dahl is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a Senior Researcher at Statistics Norway and a Fellow of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He serves on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, Applied Economics and Economic Inquiry. Previously, he was a faculty member at the University of Rochester and held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1998 and his BA from Brigham Young University in 1993.