The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...

The social contract of the welfare state can be strained by the arrival of immigrants who receive welfare payments financed by citizens' taxes. We show, however, that the presence of unemployed immigrants receiving welfare payments is consistent with social harmony. The social harmony, which is...

The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which an individual's use of unemployment insurance (UI) as a young adult is influenced by past experience with the program, and by having had a parent who also collected UI. A major methodological challenge is to determine the extent to...

This paper summarizes the findings from the Self Sufficiency Project: a large scale social experiment that is being conducted in Canada to evaluate the effect of high-powered financial incentives for full time work among former welfare recipients. The experimental results confirm the importance...

This paper proposes a dichotomous choice model that is based on a transformed beta (or "z") distribution. This model, called betit, nests both logit and probit and allows for various skewed and peaked disturbance densities. Because the shape of this density affects the estimated relation between...

This paper extends the standard model of life cycle consumption, saving and labor supply in a number of directions. First, it argues that consumption should be defined as expenditure on household production as well as on market goods, that is, we are interested in life cycle profiles of full...

Historically, in virtually all developed economies there seems to be clear evidence of an inverse relationship between female labor supply and fertility. However, particularly in the last decade or so, the relationship across countries has been positive: for example countries like Germany, Italy...