I have a new working paper out, joint work with Simen Markussen and Knut Røed. Simen has written provocatively about the paper in the today’s Dagens Næringsliv, which is also running a companion piece. These are only in Norwegian (and behind a paywall), however, so here is a brief summary in English:

We investigate what happens when Norwegian social insurance offices increase their use of conditions would-be welfare recipients need to satisfy in order to receive welfare. Using the staggered introduction of this program and based on double and triple difference models, we find that such conditionality reduces the number of young people that receive welfare, and more importantly, increases the high school graduation rate. For young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, we find substantial and precise effects, whereas we find no effects on youth from more resourceful backgrounds, as expected. A few years later, we find that those who were exposed to new regime have more education, earn more, and are more likely to be employed. Thus even though activating these people may cost something upfront, it pays off in the long run.

The newspaper has an interview with a guy who got on track and gets some work experience through this system. Here is the abstract of the research paper:

Based on administrative data, we analyze empirically the effects of stricter conditionality for social assistance receipt on welfare dependency and high school completion rates among Norwegian youths. Our evaluation strategy exploits a geographically differentiated implementation of conditionality. The causal effects are identified on the basis of larger-thanexpected within-municipality changes in outcomes that not only coincide with the local timing of conditionality implementation, but do so in a way that correlates with individual ex ante predicted probabilities of becoming a social assistance claimant. We find that stricter conditionality significantly reduces welfare claims and increases high school completion rates.