Using urban household surveys, we constructed a panel dataset to study the effects of the Argentine macroeconomic crisis of 1999-2002 with the aim of (1) identifying the most vulnerable households, (2) investigating whether employment in the public sector and government spending served to...

Food assistance programs play an important role in meeting the basic needs of low income households. This paper examines the interaction among food stamps, labor force participation and food insecurity status of low-income households under different program design and economic conditions. A...

Disincentives to employment participation arising from the tax-benefit system have been a major concern for welfare reform. Data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey are used to generate and test the robustness of three commonly used disincentive measures for...

This study explores the relationship between education and unemployment and the role of the unemployment trap in that relation. The main distinctive element compared to other studies is the introduction of the educational level as the central variable in the analysis. The empirical analysis,...

<p>General Assistance (GA) programs are virtually unstudied. Yet, GA programs serve an economically vulnerable, non-trivial population that should be of interest. To begin to address this shortcoming, two welfare-to-work programs, in which GA recipients participated, are studied. Using a...</p>

This study estimates chronic and transitory rates of poverty in Australia using the concept of permanent income and longitudinal data covering the period July 2001 through June 2007. We sketch a picture of chronic and transitory poverty over the life cycle by decomposing the poverty rate for the...

This paper examines properties of optimal poverty assistance programs under different informational environments using an income maintenance framework. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting...