Marike Knoef

This paper investigates the effects of application processing times on welfare applicants’ benefit and employment outcomes. For causal inference, we exploit exogenous variation in application processing times stemming from the random assignment of caseworkers. Our findings indicate that longer application processing times deter applicants from receiving benefits, particularly those with better labor market prospects. In contrast, for applicants who eventually receive benefits, longer processing times reduce labor market attachment and increase benefit dependency. Finally, using exogenous variation in caseworkers’ provision of benefit prepayments, we find that the receipt of welfare prepayments increases the employment and earnings of awarded applicants. This suggests that reduced financial stress improves successful job search.

We study preferences for different types of home care insurance using a discrete choice experiment. We consider domestic, personal, and social care, a home care annuity, and home adaptations lump-sum. To understand variation in preferences, we relate willingness to pay to personal circumstances, preferences, and expectations. We find that the majority value in-kind and in-cash insurance above the actuarial premium. While most respondents value coverage for basic levels of support, we find diminishing marginal utility for higher levels of support. For in-kind care, willingness to pay is positively associated with respondent characteristics: being single, household income, home ownership, risk aversion, low bequest motives, expected length of home care use, expected expenditures when in need of care, and low expected availability of informal care. In contrast, in-cash support is valued regardless of respondent characteristics, possibly because its inherent flexibility. These results contribute to the design of insurance schemes for home care.

This paper introduces a new survey item to measure preferences for income redistribution. Respondents construct their preferred distribution of after-tax income by changing the tax rates of the bottom four income quintiles. Taxes for the top income quintile update automatically to keep government revenues fixed and take into account the costs of redistribution. Dutch data indicate that around 50-60% prefer more equality. Only 5% opt for more inequality, but not beyond a at-tax. We investigate the formation of redistributive preferences. Information about efficiency costs of taxation and the use of social insurance among low incomes shifts preferences towards greater inequality.

This chapter presents the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) panel. This infrastructure provides an innovative method of data collection and data access. It offers researchers the opportunity to field surveys and conduct experiments, to analyze the effect of interventions, and to link collected survey data to administrative data available from Statistics Netherlands. The infrastructure is used mostly by academic researchers but also by applied researchers, in a wide variety of studies in various disciplines. The authors demonstrate how the LISS infrastructure can be used to carry out relevant scientific and policy research to tackle contemporary societal challenges. The examples of policy-relevant research presented here focus on the adequacy of retirement savings, retirement expenditure goals, and the behavioral responses of individuals to certain policies through stated preference analyses.