In the Self Sufficiency Project Applicant Experiment, new welfare entrants were informed that if they remained on public assistance for a year they would become eligible to receive a generous earnings subsidy offer. Those who satisfied the waiting period, and then left welfare and began working...

In this paper we document patterns of annual employment across jobs, workers and firms, and examine the relationship between these patterns and job-level earnings rates using data from Statistics New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED). First, we characterise workers’ annual...

This paper analyses income distribution changes in New Zealand between 1983 and 1998. We use a semi-parametric kernel density approach and a range of inequality summary measures to assess the distributional effects of changes in five sets of factors: household structure, National Superannuation...

In the Self Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full-time work. The subsidy was available for 3 years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing...