This paper investigates the impact of financial incentive programs, which have become an increasingly common component of welfare programs. We review experimental evidence from several such programs. Financial incentive programs appear to increase work and raise income (lower poverty), but cost...

The role and relevance of Social Fund Community-Driven Development (SF/CDD) has been highly debated in the international development community. Some conceive these programs only as parallel and temporary arrangements that can ensure short-term delivery of development benefits. Others emphasize...

This study brief on "Social Assistance Programs and Household Welfare in Eswatini" examines the performance of Eswatini's main social assistance programs. These programs employ varying combinations of categorical and self-targeting to reach the poor and vulnerable

This paper examines the economic foundations of some recently proposed criteria for evaluating the benefits of social programs. These criteria are appropriate for comparing a class of revenue-constant policies. They replace foundational principles of social opportunity costs with accounting...

Housing is one of the areas where it may be most critical for poor people to have access to legal representation in civil cases. We study the roll-out of New York City's Universal Access to Counsel program (UA), using detailed address-level housing court data from 2016 to 2019. The program,...

The efficiency and effectiveness of generalized subsidies as part of a safety net system are questionable. This is because generalized subsidies tend to create distortions in the food and fuel markets and are likely to be regressive and to suffer from significant leakage of benefits to the...

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed...

The extent to which households can self-insure and the government can help them to do so depends on the wage risk that they face and their family structure. We study wage risk in the UK and show that the persistence and riskiness of wages depends on one's age and position in the wage...