This paper presents an in-depth analysis of who benefits and who misses out on social assistance (SA) transfers in Malaysia. As the first in a two-part series on SA, the paper uses data from the Household Income Survey (HIS) of 2019 and 2022 to assess targeting outcomes and the adequacy of...

The tax and transfer system partially insures households against individual income risk. We build a framework to assess the size and (welfare) value of this partial insurance, which is based on exploiting distributional differences between household gross income and disposable income. Our...

This study examines the career aspirations of economically disadvantaged Filipino children participating in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the Philippines' flagship conditional cash transfer program. Using data from 9,958 children aged 10 to 25 collected through the Fourth Wave...

This study examines whether receiving anticipatory cash transfers during an extreme winter affects households’ demand for index-based livestock insurance. We exploit a randomized field experiment conducted during the 2020/21 winter disaster in western Mongolia and combine household panel...

Integration agreements (IA) outline the efforts the jobseeker should undertake to find employment and specify the services that the caseworker would provide to assist them in their job search. The agreements include a declaration of legal consequences, and punitive benefit sanctions could be...

Colombia has a complex legal framework meant to protect the population against basic risks through a combination of contributory and non-contributory social insurance. The population is almost perfectly split between them, with eligibility to participate in the latter determined by poverty....

How effective are cash transfers at improving labour market outcomes in settings characterized by severe job scarcity and constraints to self-employment? This paper provides evidence of the labour market effects of South Africa's Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, a low-value, unconditional...

South Africa has a relatively well-developed social protection system for a middle-income country. Despite its roots in the country's racially discriminatory past, the system has been repurposed post-apartheid to address deep poverty and severe inequality. This paper explores key characteristics...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes aim to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by fostering human capital accumulation among children in vulnerable households. However, due to data limitations, evidence on their long-run effects remains scarce. This paper contributes to...

The current report presents findings of a research project that explored attitudes towards welfare and redistributive policies among Irish residents. Public support for the welfare state is an important foundation for democratic governments to pursue the policies needed to alleviate poverty in...

We develop and estimate a dynamic model of household labor supply and SNAP participation that explains two empirical puzzles: incomplete program take-up despite substantial benefits, and minimal employment effects of SNAP work requirements despite the constraints they impose. Our model...

Chile combines high income levels and strong human development outcomes with persistent inequality. This paper examines the country's social protection matrix, focusing on its institutional configuration, financial structure, and main outcomes. The analysis distinguishes three core components-...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

When structural labor supply models are unavailable or impractical, the paper proposes a practical method for incorporating behavioral responses into static taxbenefit microsimulation models. Using elasticity estimates from the literature, the proposed external evidence procedure offers a...

This replication study revisits Attanasio et al. (2015), which examines the effects of conditional cash transfers on preventive health care utilization and child health outcomes in Colombia. Using the original data and replication files, we successfully reproduce all the main tables and figures...

Cahyadi et al. (2020) examine the cumulative effects of conditional cash transfer programs in Indonesia after 2 and 6 years. They find beneficial effects for several of the indicators targeted by the cash transfer programme. They find a substantial increase in childcare using trained...

This paper discusses the key concepts and main stylized facts concerning household real income and income inequality in the United States in recent decades. It explains the widely used summary measures of income distribution, which reveal that income inequality in the US has been steadily...

This paper examines how parental migration interacts with unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) for education by analyzing Indonesia's Smart Indonesia Program (PIP), which provides educational grants to children from poor households. Using a difference-in-differences approach and nationally...

Disasters due to natural hazards pose a significant threat to people’s well-being and increase the risk of poverty, particularly in vulnerable populations. This paper provides a novel global estimate of poverty due to disasters, showing that 25.6 million people are at risk of poverty due to...

Little is known about the extent and drivers of information flow within couples and whether spouses hold aligned expectations about the same outcomes. To provide new evidence, we conduct an online survey of 2,200 middle-aged married couples in the U.S. Our focus is on expectations about Social...

Die vorliegende Studie fragt nach Herkunft, Bedeutung und Auswirkung der Bezeichnung "Totalverweigerer", die ursprünglich von Bundesarbeitsminister Hubertus Heil für Grundsicherungsbeziehende, die mehrfach die Aufnahme einer Erwerbsarbeit verweigern, verwendet wurde. Ende März 2024 wurde dann...

This policy note examines the role of social safety nets in addressing persistent poverty and inequality in Cameroon. Building on over a decade of implementation, Cameroon's main safety nets initiative-the Projet Filets Sociaux (PFS)-has laid important foundations but remains limited in scale...

We study how public school teachers use paid sick leave. Most US sick leave schemes operate as individualized credit accounts: Paid leave is earned, and unused leave accumulates. We construct a unique dataset of daily leave balances and behavior among 982 teachers for 2010–2018. Sick leave use...

This paper assesses the impact of the Agrarian Unemployment Benefit (AUB), a regionally targeted income support scheme introduced in Andalucía, Spain, in 1984. At its peak, the program covered more than 10% of the regional labour force, making it one of the most extensive welfare measures of...

We develop a framework to assess when social programmes should prioritize expanding coverage versus improving targeting accuracy. Rather than treating universalism and targeting as a binary choice, we derive a practical rule-of-thumb based on observed eligibility rates and programme quotas to...

Innovations in big data and algorithms are enabling new approaches to target interventions at scale. We compare the accuracy of three different systems for identifying the poor to receive benefit transfers - proxy means-testing, nominations from community members, and an algorithmic approach...

As increasingly frequent extreme weather events disrupt lives, institutions are turning to early-warning systems and advance preparation to accelerate aid delivery. A randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh and Nepal tested whether providing cash within days of a flood leads to greater...