Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative, longitudinal survey, this study examines changing levels of Unemployment Insurance (UI) eligibility and benefit receipt among working low-educated single mothers, 1990–2005. It also examines changing participation in cash welfare and the Food Stamp Program (FSP). Relative to single childless women, there h...

In order to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives, the effects on absenteeism and not just on contracted hours should be taken into account. In particular, absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable. In this paper we examine whether the level of sick leave compensation affects sick leave behavior. Using time-series data for Sweden spanning a l...

Employment, Hours of Work and the Optimal Taxation of Low Income Families The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving reforms and also optimal desi...

How could well-being data, for example those based on survey measures, be used for guiding policy? Exploring one direction, we analyze a mechanism that takes as inputs estimates of policy effects on different groups’ utility proxies (constructed from the well-being data), and aggregates them into policy-change recommendations. We develop three justifications for the mechanism based on: an analo...

Understanding the Economic Consequences of Shifting Trends in Population Health The public economic burden of shifting trends in population health remains uncertain. Sustained increases in obesity, diabetes, and other diseases could reduce life expectancy − with a concomitant decrease in the public-sector’s annuity burden − but these savings may be offset by worsening functional status, which i...

In many developing countries, public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are often meant to protect vulnerable households from consumption and nutrition downturns by providing a safety net. Few studies have evaluated the impact of these programs. Furthermore, households often use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support an...

This study examines the effect of a community-based work experience program Work for the Dole (WfD) on transitions out of unemployment in Australia. To evaluate the WfD program a quasi-experimental exact matching approach is applied. Justification for the matching approach is a ‘natural experiment’ limits on WfD project funding that it is argued constituted a source of random assignment to the ...

This paper compares the dynamic consistency of targeting methodologies that use multidimensional welfare indicators with those based on means and proxy means tests using panel data from Mexico. To make these comparisons, an extension of the Alkire and Foster (2008) dual cutoff multidimensional poverty methodology is proposed. This extension provides a relative approach to multidimensional depri...

This paper uses household level unit record data from South Africa to examine the behavioural and welfare impacts of private and public transfers. We allow for joint endogeneity of resource variables and the expenditure shares. Our results show that crowding out of private transfers as a result of the introduction of public pensions holds only for poor households and not for the non-poor. Both ...