Numerous studies conclude that ethnic/cultural/racial diversity has negative impacts on interpersonal trust and support for redistributive social programs. Although some Canadian public opinion data is consistent with this view, whether these impacts on public opinion are important enough to...

The results show that the increase in social assistance benefits has been a major factor behind the decline in employment rates of lone mothers in Ontario. It is stimated that each $1,000 increase in benefit rates is associated with a 1.9 percentage points reduction in the employment rate of...

The results of this study largely confirm the results of the author's previous study (Kapsalis, 1996). In fact, one of the two regression models estimated here produced an identical coefficient for the effect of social assistance benefits on the employment rate of lone mothers -- i.e. each...

This study attempts to answer the following basic question: why do some lone parents escape low income or never enter spells of low income or social assistance (SA), while others remain in low income or on SA for many years? The analysis relies on the 1993-98 longitudinal panel of the Survey of...

Seguro Popular (SP) was introduced in 2002 to provide health insurance to the 50 million Mexicans without Social Security. This paper tests whether the program has had unintended consequences, distorting workers' incentives to operate in the informal sector. The analysis examines the impact of...

An essential difference between the design of the Swedish and the US in-work tax credit systems relates to their functional forms. Where the US earned income tax credit (EITC) is phased out and favours low and medium earnings, the Swedish system is not phased out and offers 17 and 7 per cent tax...

Social welfare systems usually imply specific obligations for benefit recipients. If a recipient does not comply with these obligations, a sanction involving a punitive benefits reduction may be imposed. In this paper we give an overview of the literature on the effects of sanctions in social...

In this article, I study state dependence in social assistance receipt in Germany using annual survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1995-2011. There is considerable observed state dependence, with an average persistence rate in benefits of 68% comparing to an...

Evidence on the effectiveness of workfare as an anti-poverty program in developing countries is weak compared with the relatively well-established role of public works during economic crisis as a social safety net. This paper contributes to evidence building by examining the impact of a...

We evaluate the impact on youth crime of a welfare reform that tightened activation requirements for social assistance clients. The evaluation strategy exploits administrative individual data in combination with geographically differentiated implementation of the reform. We find that the reform...