To increase their transition from welfare to work, benefit recipients in the municipality of Rotterdam were exposed to various financial incentives, including both carrots to sticks. Once their benefit spell exceeded one year, welfare recipients were entitled to a reemployment bonus if they...

This paper seeks new insight into the reasons for persistent hardship in some Chinese rural households from the perspective of assets, stressing the long-run implications of shocks and risk on households' agricultural asset holdings. Households show a tendency to hold onto substantial savings to...

This paper rectifies the poverty decomposition framework of Rodgers and Rodgers (1993) which violates the Focus Axiom of Sen (1976). An empirical application of the rectified technique reveals that poverty in rural China was dominated by the chronic component.

Despite considerable research, there is little consensus about the impact of Medicaid eligibility expansions for low-income children. In this paper, I reexamine the expansions' impact on Medicaid take-up and private insurance "crowd-out." Focusing on the most influential estimates of the...

A substantial proportion of China's rapid economic growth is attributed to its large number of rural to urban migrants, but most of these migrants' children are left behind in rural areas, mainly due to China's household registration system. Any attempt to identify the impact of parental...

How does the introduction of rural public work schemes impact individual incentives to migrate? This paper examines this question in the context of rural public work program (Yigong-daizhen) in China, and unveils empirical evidence that suggest that the introduction of Yigong-daizhen projects in...

The objective of the article has consisted of a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of the economic poverty state during the period 1985-1995, using the Panel Household Budget Survey for this period of time. The three aspects of poverty incidence, intensity and inequality in the left tail...

This Paper analyses the persistence of poverty in Sweden using a hazard rate model based on multiple spells. The model also accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and possibly endogenous initial conditions. We estimate the model on a large representative Swedish panel dataset, LINDA, for the...

This paper studies labour market transitions out of temporary jobs in Italy, focussing on the period that immediately follows the last 2003 labour market reform, and immediately preceding the economic downturn of the second half of 2007. The data-set used is the 2004-2007 IT-SILC individual...

This paper considers estimation of a pure equilibrium search model in which all heterogeneity is endogenous and due to information asymmetries, and of variations that allow better fits to the data. Measurement error and heterogeneity in the productivity levels of firms. The model is fit to a...