 Compulsory activation of young welfare recipients: revisiting the trade-off between workfare and welfare generosityBård Smedsvik and Roberto Iacono LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library Abstract: We revisit the trade-off between workfare and welfare through a quasi-natural experiment by exploiting municipal variation from a 2017 Norwegian reform introducing compulsory activation for young welfare recipients. The results show a significant negative effect on social assistance. On the other hand, we find no effect on income adequacy, implying that other transfers mitigate the drop in social assistance. Our results convey therefore that the trade-off between workfare and welfare is binding when focusing exclusively on social assistance: investing in activation policies creates challenges to poverty alleviation channeled through the last social safety net. However, the trade-off is mitigated through other transfers, allowing us to conclude that social investment does not need to be inimical to the poor. Keywords: public administration; welfare state; causal mechanisms; social policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Socio-Economic Review, 11, November, 2025. ISSN: 1475-1461 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:130149 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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