In the Netherlands, from 1989 to 2013, in the age group 55-63 the annual exit rate from employment to receiving social insurance benefits in the following year decreased from around 17 percent to 7 percent for men, and from 14 percent to 5 percent for women. We found that less generous social...

In Belgium, a series of social security reforms have been implemented over the years with the overarching goal of increasing the labor force participation through better work incentives. Using individual-level administrative data, the paper studies the impact of those incentive-based reforms on...

The over-60 population in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades, tripling between 2020 and 2050. Despite this explosive projected growth, few countries in the region have implemented policies designed to support older populations. Further, little research in...

In this paper we examine the causal relationship between formal social insurance and individuals' migration decisions. We exploit a quasi experimental design in rural China, under which county officials were assigned to a group of villages (i.e., treated villages) to serve as village supervisors...

Economic research on the safety net has evolved significantly over time, moving away from a near exclusive focus on the negative incentive effects of means-tested assistance on employment, earnings, marriage and fertility to include examination of the potential positive benefits of such programs...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated mitigation strategies exacted a large economic toll on large portions of the United States population. For older and disabled workers, the effects could be more persistent and fiscally costly than the impacts experienced by young, healthy workers due to the...

This study examines how elderly employment is associated with social security programs and how it responds to recent reforms in Japan. To this end, we employed a rich and longitudinal dataset of middle-aged and older individuals collected between 2005 and 2018. By incorporating various factors...

The federal government enacted massive spending in the Pandemic Recession. But was this spending scaled to the magnitude of the economic downturn? We examine the responsiveness of the safety net to the Pandemic Recession and compare it to that in the Great Recession. Using monthly state-level...

This paper studies the labor market impacts of firm accommodation decisions and assesses implications for the design of social insurance for workplace disability. We leverage a unique workers' compensation (WC) program in Oregon that provides wage subsidies to firms for accommodating injured...