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...

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...

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...

This study evaluates the incidence of food and non-food social programs in function of income inequality in households in Peru during 2022-2024 in a context of persistent distributive gaps, despite social interventions aimed at promoting equity. Data from the National Household Survey (ENAHO)...

This article introduces Green EUROMOD, the environmental extension of the EU's tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD. It provides a novel framework for evaluating the distributional, environmental, and fiscal impacts of green policy reforms across the 27 EU Member States. The model captures...

We examine optimal government education expenditure policies in the form of cash transfers to school-aged children, with the objectives of enhancing intergenerational income mobility and reducing the skill premium. Using a calibrated overlapping generations (OLG) model tailored to recent...

This paper analyses how UK tax-benefit policies shaped poverty, inequality, and living standards between 2019 and 2023, spanning the COVID-19 shock and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis. Using the UKMOD tax-benefit microsimulation model combined with imputed household consumption data, we...

We provide new evidence on the mental health and healthcare utilisation impacts of the rollout of Universal Credit, one of the most significant welfare reforms in Europe in recent decades. Designed to simplify the benefit system and strengthen work incentives by merging six meanstested...

Purpose and scope: This analysis assesses the cumulative impact of the Autumn Budget Statement 2025 on UK residents over the period 2026-2030. The Budget has been passed by Parliament and will be implemented beginning in April 2026. This report models policy impact on the UK population using...

This paper describes the integration of labour supply behavioural responses into UKMOD, the UK tax-benefit microsimulation model belonging to the EUROMOD family. Traditional static models quantify only the direct ("morning after") fiscal and distributional effects of policy reforms, abstracting...

In April 2013, a significant change to Child Benefit (CB) was introduced in the UK: it switched from a universal benefit to a targeted benefit. The new High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICBC) required families to repay some or all of their Child Benefit via the tax system if either partner's...

Non-take-up of social benefits occurs when eligible individuals or households fail to claim welfare support to which they are entitled. This paper provides new estimates of take-up for major UK benefits between 2008 and 2023, including Child Benefit, Pension Credit, and Universal Credit together...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Social security systems constitute a structurally significant component of public finance in developing economies and often generate persistent fiscal pressures through budgetary transfers. Demographic transformation, widespread informality in labor markets, and weaknesses in contribution-based...

Studies across countries find that single-mother households are socioeconomically disadvantaged. However, the heterogeneity of these households is regularly overlooked in the literature, with lone-mother households (with only one female adult) frequently undifferentiated from households in which...

This policy paper aims to understand the barriers faced by urban poor Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur in accessing SA, as well as their experiences in navigating the SA system. This case study focuses on the ease of access to SA of residents in PPR, who comprise a majority of urban poor Malaysians,...

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-...

Evolving from post-independence emergency relief to a diverse range of programmes addressing poverty, food insecurity, and lifecycle vulnerabilities, Bangladesh has made significant progress in social protection provision over the years. This paper critically examines the evolution, coverage,...

While Viet Nam has been remarkably successful in poverty reduction, the country is faced with various challenges ranging from uneven pockets of poverty, regional inequality, low labour productivity, and high informality rates, to a fast-ageing society. We offer an updated overview of the social...

Multiple program participation is a defining feature of the U.S. safety net, with half of recipients enrolling in two or more programs. Yet most research examines programs in isolation, missing the intensity of safety net attachment. We show implications of a multipleprogram framework on...

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...

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....

We evaluate the Education Maintenance Allowance, a large conditional cash transfer scheme that paid low-income teenagers in England to remain in education beyond age 16. Using the staggered national roll-out of the programme and linked administrative data tracking education, earnings, welfare...

While Vietnam has been remarkably successful in poverty reduction, the country is faced with various challenges ranging from uneven pockets of poverty, regional inequality, low labour productivity, and high informality rates, to a fast-ageing society. We offer an updated overview of the social...

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...

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...