The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs...

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...