This paper examines the impacts of recent Australian welfare to work reforms for low-income parents of school-aged children who had been in receipt of Parenting Payment – the main welfare payment for this group – for at least one year. Specifically, the reforms introduced a requirement to...

We investigate the role of employment in explaining changes in the mental health of single mothers compared to partnered mothers and single childless women during the period of welfare reform in the UK. We employ a time allocation framework to explore if reductions in benefit income led to a...

Previous studies on low-skilled single mothers focus generally either on the binary welfare use or work decision. However, work among welfare participants has increased steadily since the mid 1990s. This study estimates role of the 1993 EITC expansion on the decline of welfare caseloads using a...

This paper assesses the short-run impact of first-year maternal employment on low-income children's cognitive development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the U.S.'s welfare work requirement rules - namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions - as a source of...

Work requirements are common in many U.S. safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals. Using linked administrative data on food stamps (SNAP) and earnings with a...

The paper describes to which extent European welfare states support an individual adult worker model and how the current policy should be assessed in terms of gender equality. Although a more individual design of welfare policies is clearly recognizable, the paper also illustrates the large gap...

Policy changes in the United States in the 1990s resulted in sizable increases in employment rates of single mothers. We show that this increase led to a large and abrupt increase in work experience for single mothers with young children. We then examine the economic return to this increase in...

Experiments conducted in the mid-1990s show that a combination of work requirements and work supports substantially increased the employment of cash assistance recipients in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the predecessor program to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while...

Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household's labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the 'intent to treat effect' of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme on prime-age women's labour supply decisions in India, where...