Neil A. Cholli

Working Papers

Who Benefits from Digitizing Public Programs? (draft coming soon)

This version: August 2026

Governments increasingly digitize access to public programs, but it remains unclear who benefits. Using administrative microdata from Virginia, we study the impact of an online portal that streamlined SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF applications. Among children and non-elderly adults, the portal raised enrollment by 1.7–2.0% for every ten miles between their residence and local program office. Yet it had no detectable effect on the elderly, despite their lower participation and comparable enrollment barriers. Predicted digital access accounts for 84% of the variation in effects across these groups, showing that digitization can expand access while excluding vulnerable groups like the elderly.

Multiple Program Participation in the Safety Net: Incidence, Impediments, and Implications

with Derek Wu

Washington Center for Equitable Growth article

This version: July 2026 (WCEG). Previous version (IZA). First version: August 2025

Multiple program participation is a defining feature of the U.S. safety net, with half of recipients enrolling in two or more programs. Yet most research examines programs in isolation, missing the intensity of safety net attachment. We show implications of a multiple-program framework on take-up, targeting, and welfare, using administrative data and a reform streamlining SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF applications. The reform increased multiple program participation more than any program, with 38–62% of gains from single-to-multiple-program transitions among the most disadvantaged — a margin missed by single-program frameworks. Evaluating with multiple instead of single programs alters welfare calculations by up to 64%.

Long-Run Impacts of a Two-Generation Approach to Social Policy

This version: October 2025

“Two-generation approaches" to human capital interventions—coupling job training for welfare-reliant mothers and daycare for their young children—have long been theorized to disrupt intergenerational cycles of poverty. Existing evidence, however, is mixed and focuses on the short-term effects of small-scale interventions. Evaluation is particularly challenging since conventional instrumental variable approaches fail to identify the joint effect of both job training and daycare. This paper evaluates the long-run impacts of the two-generation approach at a population scale. I exploit unique policy variation in Denmark to develop an instrumental variables approach that circumvents conventional identification challenges to estimate the joint effect. My initial results find that the two-generation approach decreased children's welfare dependence in early adulthood and increased their educational attainment up to age 30. Future drafts will employ a structural bounding approach to test for complementarity effects between job training and daycare.

Understanding the Heterogeneity of Intergenerational Mobility across Neighborhoods

with Steven N. Durlauf, Rasmus Landersø, and Salvador Navarro

Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

This version: March 2025. First version: October 2024 (NBER)

Recent research shows significant variation in intergenerational mobility across neighborhoods in many countries, yet its causes remain unclear. This paper develops and employs a generalized mobility model to assess the roles of family selection into neighborhoods and locational characteristics in shaping this heterogeneity. Using Danish administrative data, we analyze mobility across nearly 300 larger and 2,000 smaller neighborhoods, accounting for sampling error. Family selection and sampling error explain most variation, though a small, persistent residual remains. An analysis of this "irreducible heterogeneity" suggests the presence of multiple neighborhood types and nonlinear effects of family characteristics that influence intergenerational mobility.

Does "Welfare-to-Work" Work? Evaluating Long-Run Effects across a Generation of Cohorts

Winner of APPAM PhD Dissertation Award
Runner-up of NTA Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
Finalist of W.E. Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award

This version: April 2025. First Version: November 2022

Work requirements in welfare programs are popular yet controversial. This paper provides a unified evaluation of Denmark’s "welfare-to-work" reforms by analyzing their long-term effects across 19 birth cohorts. Impacts vary by age of exposure to the reforms. Adult cohorts incur modest income losses and shift toward crime and disability insurance. In contrast, child cohorts exposed before becoming welfare-eligible reap gains in education, income, and health, likely due to parental spillovers and anticipation effects. Cost-benefit analysis shows welfare-to-work is cost-effective in the long run due to these younger cohorts. These findings help unify the literature and suggest more efficient policy designs.

Published & Forthcoming

Intergenerational Mobility

with Steven N. Durlauf

Forthcoming, Social Stratification, Fifth Edition (invited contribution)

This essay reviews the theory and empirics of intergenerational mobility. Our review draws on models and empirical analyses of classic and more recent work from both economics and sociology. We summarize models and the surrounding empirical evidence of two key sets of mechanisms: family factors (income, education, credit constraints, household composition, and genes) and social factors (schools, neighborhood sorting, racial segregation, and peer and role model effects). We then discuss and evaluate current methods used to measure intergenerational mobility, including linear regressions and Markov chains. Theoretical models imply nonlinear relationships between parent and child status that are often ignored in practice and offer potentially different interpretations of the evidence of heterogeneity in mobility across locations, groups, and time. We conclude that the next generation of studies would benefit from a closer integration of theory with empirics.

Immobility as Memory: Some New Approaches to Characterizing Intergenerational Dependence via Markov Chains

with Lawrence E. Blume, Steven N. Durlauf, and Aleksandra Lukina

Sociological Methods & Research 54, no. 4 (2025): 1396-1434.

This paper proposes some new measures of intergenerational persistence based on the idea of characterizing the memory of origin in the stochastic process that links the socioeconomic classes of parents and children. We introduce "memory curves" for all future generations given any initial condition of class for a family dynasty, which reveal how initial conditions interact with the transition process between parents and children to create mobility and persistence. We also propose ways to aggregate information across different classes to produce overall characterizations of mobility in the population. To illustrate our measures, we estimate occupational "memory curves" using U.S. survey data. Our findings show that, on average, the memory of initial conditions dissipates largely within three generations, though there is meaningful heterogeneity in mobility rates across dynasties originating from different occupational classes.

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