In Norway, immigrants receive higher levels of social assistance than natives. How can we explain this difference? After controlling for differences in take‐up rates through a two‐step Heckman procedure, we attempt to answer this question by exploiting rich data from administrative registers. We operationalise social assistance in the Norwegian context by employing a composite variable that includes: (a) financial assistance, (b) housing allowance and (c) qualification benefit. We quantitatively analyze the difference in benefit levels of social assistance between the first and second generations of immigrants and the benchmark levels of the non‐immigrant population through a Kitagawa‐Oaxaca‐Blinder (KOB) decomposition exercise. The results of the analysis indicate that a significant portion of the gap in benefit reception between immigrant groups and natives is due to observable characteristics (42% for immigrants and 69% for their descendants), with unobservable cultural and behavioural factors explaining the remaining portion of the gap.

This article argues that part-time employment has several features of precarity tied to both institutional and individual factors. The consequences can be increased inequality, insecurity, and instability. It studies the relationship between part-time employment for individuals with weak labor market attachment, with periods of social assistance reception in Norway. The article used Norwegian register data to analyze this relationship. Findings show that individuals with a low employment percentage have significantly longer social assistance recipiency compared to those who work full-time, prior to social assistance reception. The empirical evidence supports an individual risk from part-time employment in this group, as well as the claim that non-standard employment is associated with increased vulnerability for individuals with weak labor market attachment. The findings relate to theoretical framework regarding the precarity and mechanisms of the labor market on several aspects, especially how institutional and individual elements link part-time employment to economic and social insecurity.

Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social assistance. The empirical challenge is that activation through the threat of benefit sanctions is not a feature that unambiguously emerges from observational data, except for when sanctions indeed take place and benefits are reduced. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a novel methodology to identify individual-level effects of activation on young welfare recipients, exploiting municipal variation in the introduction of compulsory activation. More precisely, we study whether individuals who are residents in municipalities that have introduced compulsory activation display a stronger relationship between their labor market status (activation) and their benefit size (because sanctions being in place) compared to individuals residing in municipalities where activation has not been made compulsory. Our results show that there is no different relationship between social assistance benefits and passive labor market status for individuals living in municipalities that practice activation compared with individuals residing in municipalities in which activation is not yet mandatory. In other words, there is no visible effect of sanctions for passive recipients.