We examine the living standards and health of working-age disabled people and disability benefits recipients over time in the UK. The UK’s disability benefits system (which is non-means-tested and in which receipt is unrelated to work status) has gone through a significant transformation since...

We assess the non-contributory cash transfer systems in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries to identify factors that keep them from reducing poverty and inequality. To perform this assessment, we analyze three dimensions of size (number of beneficiaries, size of transfer per beneficiary,...

A key challenge for policymakers is how to design methods to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is volatile and the target population is dynamic. We evaluate a traditional static proxy-means test (PMT) and three policy-relevant alternatives. We use a unique panel dataset of a...

We exploit an expansion in social protection to middle-income households to provide evidence on how middle-income households cope with economic shocks and how to build their resilience. We use a regression discontinuity design around the eligibility cutoff for a program that delivered monthly...

German and United States data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to compare the relative economic well-being of Germans and Americans in the 1980s. In our analysis we use both official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for Germany and...

This paper presents findings from the Regional Project on Child Development Indicators, PRIDI for its acronym in Spanish. PRIDI created a new tool, the Engle Scale, for evaluating development in children aged 24 to 59 months in four domains: cognition, language and communication, socio-emotional...

Amidst the bleak picture of increasing joblessness and indebtedness presented by the National Sample Survey's employment surveys and debt surveys, a minimum standard of living for the nation's poor seems to be under threat. In response to this, recent schemes inspired by the Universal Basic...

During a period of COVID-19-induced job losses and mobility restrictions, the government of Colombia's launched Empléate, an innovative Pay-for-performance (P4P) program that targeted impoverished and vulnerable workers. Empléate operated at a national scale and had a novel financial...

A growing polarization of society accompanied with an erosion of the middle class experiences more and more attention at least in the recent German economic and social policy discussion. Our study contributes to the polarization discussion with respect to multidimensional theoretical measurement...

Extending the traditional income poverty concept by multidimensional poverty has been of growing interest within the last years. This paper contributes with an analysis of interdependent multidimensional (IMD) poverty intensity of time and income, which in particular restricts social...