Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of welfare reform experiments suggesting that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. Using data on Connecticut's Jobs First experiment, we find no evidence of...

Voting is an important form of civic participation in democratic societies but a fundamental right that many citizens do not exercise. This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the U.S. in the 1990s on voting of low income women. Using the November Current Population Surveys with...

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...

Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

This paper assesses the short-run impact of first-year maternal employment on low-income children's cognitive development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the U.S.'s welfare work requirement rules – namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions – as a source of...

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian research and demonstration project that attempted to "make work pay" for long-term income assistance (IA) recipients by supplementing their earnings. The long-term goal of SSP was to get lone parents permanently off IA and into the paid labour...

This paper presents new information on activity-related eligibility criteria for unemployment and related benefits in OECD and EU countries in 2017, comparing the strictness of "demanding" elements built into unemployment benefits across countries and over time. Eligibility criteria for...

We analyze the labor supply and income effects of a needs-based minimum benefit system ("Bedarfsorientierte Mindestsicherung") to be introduced in Austria by the end of this/beginning of next year. The aim of this reform is to reduce poverty as well as increasing employment rates of recipients...

We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and...

The paper evaluates the distributional effects on earnings and income of requiring young welfare recipients to fulfill conditions related to work and activation. It exploits within-social insurance office variation in policy arising from a geographically staggered reform in Norway. The reform...