Gordon B. Dahl

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 A. Kostol and M. 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 program participation, since any original effect on the current generation can be reinforced by changing the behavior of their children as well.

Mr. Dahl's research interests are in Labor Economics and Applied Microeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from how income affects child achievement, to peer effects among coworkers and family members, to the impact of incarceration on recidivism and employment, to intergenerational links in welfare use. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Gordon B. Dahl is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an Affiliated Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, the Area Director for Labor Economics for the CESifo Research Network, an NBER Research Associate, a Research Professor at the ifo Institute, a CESifo Research Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an IZA Research Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He previously was a faculty member at the University of Rochester and has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Copenhagen, University of Stockholm, University College London, Norwegian School of Economics, and CESifo Munich. He received his PhD from Princeton University and his BA from Brigham Young University.