This paper reviews the U.S. welfare reform efforts over the 1990s and the effects of these reforms to date. Seven "lessons" of potential interest to European observers are discussed, with particular attention to the conclusions of more recent research. Such research indicates, for example, that...

Some English speaking countries provide employment-conditional tax credits and benefits with a view to increasing employment and improving familiy income in the low wage brackets. This article deals with Great Britain's Working Families' Tax Credit, Ireland's Back to Work Allowance and her...

This paper utilises a multi-country microsimulation tax-benefit model for Europe, EUROMOD, to simulate the distribution of net replacement rates for 13 European countries. We look at different types of labour market transitions by comparing household incomes in the current state with simulated...

This paper studies the relevance of social interactions among the unemployed. Identification is based on a salient and selective extension of the potential duration of unemployment benefits. If social interactions are important, ths policy change affects entitled individuals not only directly,...

While the effect of social security systems on retirement decisions has received much attention, the impact of these systems on individuals' incentives to invest in their human capital has not been analyzed. We integrate human capital investment and retirement decisions in a simple analytical...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays a time-varying exit rate. Building on Semi-Markov processes, we translate these exit rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation...