This paper simulates the effects of three increasingly bolder reforms in the Colombian social protection system: the equalization of salaried and self-employed labor contributions; the removal of payroll taxes, parafiscales; and the complete delinking of social protection benefits from labor status. We collect nationally representative information concerning individual willingness to pay for se...

The Impact of a Cash Transfer Program on Cognitive Achievement: The Bono de Desarrollo Humano of Ecuador Throughout Latin America, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs play an important role in social policy. These programs aim to influence the accumulation of human capital, as well as reduce poverty. In terms of educational outcomes, a number of impact evaluation studies have shown that su...

Participation in a social program, like that in clubs and other social organizations, is the result of a process in which an agent …rst learns about the requirements, bene…ts, and the likelihood of acceptance, applies for membership, and …nally is accepted or rejected. At each stage of the process, decisions made by the agent are responsive to expectations about the decisions and outcomes at th...

Population aging poses a challenge to the fiscal sustainability of social security systems around the world. As Baby-boomer generations approach retirement, governments have begun reforming key parameters of the social security systems. However, the behavioural and welfare impacts of many reforms are not well understood in part due to the di culty of isolating exogenous variation in program par...

Length of exposure to instruction in a training program is important in determining the labor market outcomes of participants. Employing methods to estimate the causal effects from continuous treatments, we provide insights regarding the effects of different lengths of exposure to academic and vocational instruction in Job Corps (JC)—America’s largest and most comprehensive job training program...

Findings from an evaluation of a workplace literacy program funded by the State of Indiana are presented. Working with employers, providers were given considerable latitude to design their own training regimens. The state awarded certificates to workers who achieved certain levels of proficiency in reading, math, critical thinking, problem solving (assessed by CASAS), and computer literacy (cer...

Transition Patterns for the Welfare Reliance of Low Income Mothers in Australia This paper analyzes the mobility of low income mothers in Australia between two groups of governmental transfer payments: Income support payments (IS) and Family Payments (FP, non-income support payments) only. While IS payments are to provide a subsistence of living for her, FP payments are to help low-medium incom...

In this paper we develop a methodology for identifying a population group surveyed latently in the (target) survey relevant for further processing, for example poverty calculations, but surveyed explicitly in another (source) survey, not suitable for such processing. Identification is achieved by transferring the binary information from the source survey to the target survey by means of a logis...

Ensuring adequate living standards to a growing number of elderly while restraining the growth of pension spending represents the main challenge for Italian pension policy. There is a need for an in-depth analysis of the economic conditions of the elderly which can help targeting resources in the coming years to the more needy groups. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household ...

Accounting for the Rise of Health Spending and Longevity We estimate a stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and longevity in the U.S. over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change and the increase in the generosity of health insurance on their own may expla...