Unemployment not only causes material hardship but can also affect an individual's sense of identity (i.e. their perception of belonging to a specific social group) and, consequently, feelings of personal happiness and subjective well-being. Labor market policies designed to help the unemployed...

Between 2010 and 2017, 42 U.S. states added work requirements as a food assistance eligibility criterion for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs). Another U.S. public assistance program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), provides food assistance without a work requirement, along with...

Activation policies to promote self-sufficiency among recipients of welfare and other types of benefits are becoming more common in many welfare states. We evaluate a law change in Norway making welfare receipt conditional on participation in an activation program for all welfare recipients...

Unemployment not only causes material hardship but can also affect an individual's sense of identity (i.e. their perception of belonging to a specific social group) and, consequently, feelings of personal happiness and subjective well-being. Labor market policies designed to help the unemployed...

Workfare programs are one of the most popular social protection and employment policy instruments in the developing world. They evoke the promise of efficient targeting, as well as immediate and lasting impacts on participants' employment, earnings, skills and behaviors. This paper evaluates...

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...

Mit dem "Teilhabechancengesetz" wurden zum Jahresbeginn 2019 die Instrumente "Eingliederung von Langzeitarbeitslosen" (§16e SGB II) sowie "Teilhabe am Arbeitsmarkt" (§16i SGB II) eingeführt. Beide Instrumente richten sich gleichermaßen an langzeitarbeitslose Leistungsberechtigte, die auch...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

Workfare programs are one of the most popular social protection and employment policy instruments in the developing world. They evoke the promise of efficient targeting, as well as immediate and lasting impacts on participants’ employment, earnings, skills and behaviors. This paper evaluates...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

Welfare recipients in Germany are allowed to take up supplementary jobs while receiving welfare. The possibility of having a supplementary job was introduced to reduce welfare dependency and facilitate successful labor market integration. In the present study, we use the German Panel Study...

This paper attempts to uncover the effects of a welfare-to-work programme that acts as a wage subsidy on wage growth by exploiting an expansion to this welfare programme in the UK. The conventional wisdom is that such programmes trap recipients into low wage, low quality work - this comes from...

This paper reviews the evidence of specific mandatory work-first programmes (job search assistance and workfare) for welfare recipients in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. It primarily refers to experimental and econometric evaluations. The...

This paper analyses crucial design features of unemployment insurance (UI) policies. We examine three different means of improving the efficiency of UI: the duration of benefit payments, monitoring in conjunction with sanctions, and workfare. To that end we develop a quantitative model of...

Workfare proposals concentrate on the work incentives for welfare recipients, thus focusing on the labor supply side. This paper analyzes the effects workfare has on labor demand when the labor market is unionized. As workfare reduces the number of recipients of public financial assistance, a...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on program evaluation. First, we construct a model that is well-suited to conduct equilibrium policy experiments and we illustrate effectiveness of general equilibrium models as tools for the evaluation of social programs. Second, we...

We analyse the effects of active social policy (ASP) on the dynamics of welfare dependence. We evaluate the impact of various ASP measures (employment and training) on the duration of welfare spells and subsequent employment spells, based on data from Denmark. The results show that employment...

Recent welfare reforms are prompting some state and local welfare agencies to use temporary help service firms to help place welfare recipients into jobs. Concerns have arisen that these jobs are more likely to pay low wages, provide fewer benefits, and offer less stability. We explore the...

This paper reviews the U.S. welfare reform efforts over the 1990s and the effects of these reforms to date. Seven "lessons" of potential interest to European observers are discussed, with particular attention to the conclusions of more recent research. Such research indicates, for example, that...

The impacts of introducing work requirements for welfare recipients are studied in an efficiency wage model. If the workfare package is not mandatory, it will reduce employment, profits, and utility levels of employed and unemployed workers. In contrast, mandatory effort requirements will...

Social assistance in Germany reduces the incentive to work. The U. S. Welfare to Work Programme tries to avoid such disincentives. It consists essentially of two elements: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for employees in low wage occupations and a Workfare model. The EITC and the Workfare...

Social assistance to the poor is increasingly subject to compulsory work requirements in Germany. Municipalities have started to offer temporary employment in their job-creation companies to claimants who are able to work. These claimants earn wages and social insurance contributions if they...

The unprecedented global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of “essential” yet underpaid workers, the vast inequality between the wealthy and the less fortunate, and the bottomless pit facing those without a social safety net. While the crisis has...

Workfare programs are one of the most popular social protection and employment policy instruments in the developing world. They evoke the promise of efficient targeting, as well as immediate and lasting impacts on participants’ employment, earnings, skills and behaviors. This paper evaluates...

Welfare recipients in Germany are allowed to take up supplementary jobs while receiving welfare. The possibility of having a supplementary job was introduced to reduce welfare dependency and facilitate successful labor market integration. In the present study, we use the German Panel Study...

In this paper, we explore ways of combining experimental data and non-experimental methods to estimate the differential effects of components of training programs. We show how data from a multi-site experimental evaluation in which subjects are randomly assigned to any treatment versus a control...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

The high incidence of temporary agency employment among participants in government employment programs has catalyzed debate about whether these jobs help the poor transition into stable employment and out of poverty. We provide direct evidence on this question through analysis of a Michigan...

This paper reviews the economics literature on welfare reform over the 1990s. A brief summary of the policy changes over this period is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques utilized to analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes. The paper then critically reviews the...

Despite the popularity of public works programs in developing countries, there is virtually no evidence on the value of the infrastructure they generate. This paper attempts to start filling this gap in the context of the PSNP – a largescale program implemented in Ethiopia since 2005. Under...

The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one challenging its purported work incentives and the other suggesting the possible superiority of work...

The Clinton administration has made job training and skill upgrading a major priority. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has already presented a bold program for skill enhancement drawing on a new consensus in certain circles of the social science and policy communities about the need to upgrade...

This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we demonstrate the usefulness of general equilibrium models as tools with which to draw policy implications for policies implemented in practice only as small-scale social experiments. Second, we illustrate the usefulness of social experiments...

A disproportionate share of low-skilled U.S. workers is employed by temporary-help firms. These firms offer rapid entry into paid employment, but temporary-help jobs are typically brief, and it is unknown whether they foster longer-term employment. We exploit a unique aspect of the city of...

This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of an earnings subsidy offered to long-term welfare recipients in Canada. The program -- known as the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) -- provides a supplement equal to one-half of the difference between a target earnings level and a participant's...

As the COVID-19 pandemic takes a catastrophic toll on lives and livelihoods across the United States, the harshest impact of the unpredictable virus has disproportionately fallen with foreseeable accuracy on Black, immigrant, poor, and elderly people, who are most likely to live and work in...

We analyse the existence and underlying mechanisms of neighbourhood effects in welfare-to-work transitions. The analysis is based on Luxembourg social security longitudinal data, which covers the period 2001-2015 and provides precise information at the postcode level, corresponding mostly to...

Welfare-to-work programs have been extensively studied, in most cases as a single “black box”. Our structural dynamic model and the unique data we use enable us to open this box and shed light on the mechanisms through which the various components of the program operate. We are able to...

So-called activation policies aiming at bringing jobless people into work have been a central component of welfare reforms across OECD countries during the last decades. Such policies combine restrictive and enabling programs, but their characteristic feature is that also enabling programs are...

A central concern in economics is to understand the interplay between institutions and labor markets. In this paper we argue that laboratory experiments are a powerful tool for studying labor market institutions. One of the most important advantages is the ability to implement truly exogenous...

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian research and demonstration project that attempted to "make work pay" for long-term income assistance (IA) recipients by supplementing their earnings. The long-term goal of SSP was to get lone parents permanently off IA and into the paid labour...