When TANF replaced AFDC in 1996 the marginal subsidy for state welfare spending was eliminated. This paper exploits data from a period in the history of AFDC when the structure of federal subsidies and legislative changes allow us to estimate not only the price and income elasticities of federal...

The aim of this paper is to examine the labour market impact of in-work benefit reform in the UK. Evidence is drawn from the impact of earlier reforms in the UK and similar reforms in the US. We focus on the impact on labour supply -- employment and hours of work. In the US a large proportion of...

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, 186 countries implemented direct cash transfers to households, and 181 introduced in-kind programs that lowered the cost of utilities such as electricity, water, transport, and mobile money. Do cash or in-kind transfers generate greater welfare improvements?...

Using data from the 2010-2014 American Community Survey, we use a procedure suggested by Capps et al. (2015) to identify refugees from the larger group of immigrants to examine the outcomes of refugees relocated to the U.S. Among young adults, we show that refugees that enter the U.S. before age...

Disability insurance take-up has expanded substantially in the past twenty years in the United States while shrinking in Canada. We empirically assess these trends by measuring the strength of the 'push' from weak labor markets versus the 'pull' of more generous benefits. Using an instrumental...

Survey non-response has risen in recent years which has increased the share of imputed and underreported values found on commonly used datasets. While this trend has been well-documented for earnings, the growth in non-response to government transfers questions has received far less attention....

Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who participate and receive a benefit or service. We survey estimates of take-up of social benefits around the...

This paper evaluates the effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC) on poor families. Exploiting state-level variation in EITCs, we find that the EITC helps families rise above poverty-level earnings. This occurs by inducing labor market entry in families that initially do not have an adult...

How has globalization affected the relative taxation of labor and capital, and why? To address this question we build and analyze a new database of effective macroeconomic tax rates covering 150 countries since 1965, constructed by combining national accounts data with government revenue...