Governments often prohibit resale of the benefits-in-kind provided by antipoverty programs. Yet the personal gains from those benefits are likely to vary and to be known privately, so there can be gains to poor people from trading their assignments. We know very little about those gains. To help...

Evaluations of workfare programs in poor rural economies have typically ignored two features that policy makers stress: involuntary unemployment and the expected welfare losses from work requirements. The paper generalizes past evaluation theory and methods to incorporate both features, and...

The traditional approach to poverty measurement puts no explicit weight on success at increasing the typical level of living of the poorest--raising the consumption floor. To address this deficiency, the paper defines and measures the expected value of the floor, allowing for transient effects...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the most abrupt changes in U.S. labor force participation and unemployment since the Second World War, with different consequences for men and women. This paper models the U.S. labor market to help to interpret the pandemic’s effects. After replicating and...

On the presumption that poorer people tend to work less, it is often claimed that standard measures of inequality and poverty are overestimates. The paper points to a number of reasons to question this claim. It is shown that, while the labor supplies of American adults have a positive income...

This paper analyzes the incentives provided by the Italian Social Security System (SS) to supply labor. Italy is an interesting example in this context as: (1) fertility rates are very low while life expectancy has improved dramatically over the past decades; (2) the SS Program is extremely...

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited...