This paper summarizes the findings from the Self Sufficiency Project: a large scale social experiment that is being conducted in Canada to evaluate the effect of high-powered financial incentives for full time work among former welfare recipients. The experimental results confirm the importance...

Considerable research attention has been devoted to the question of whether and to what extent changes in welfare policy legislated in the 1990s might have deterred immigrant participation in welfare programs, although only post-1996 immigrants were explicitly targeted by most of the changes....

The paper examines the possible effects of introducing a large-scale welfare reform in Sweden, namely, the introduction of comprehensive welfare accounts. Under this policy, individuals make mandatory contributions to accounts, which they can top up with voluntary contributions. In return,...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

The study of welfare participation in the U.S. prior to the 1996 welfare reform act and even afterward has focused on comparisons between native born and immigrant households. Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisons across race or with particular...

This paper examines the impact on TFP of North-South trade-related technology diffusion in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). North-South R&D flows are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The main...

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms - privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

We explore the relation between fertility and the business cycle in Latin American countries taking advantage of the existing cross-country and within-country differences in both fertility and macroeconomic conditions. First, we use a panel of 18 nations for over 45 years to study how different...

This paper investigates cyclicality in women's labour supply motivated by the hypothesis that it contributes to smoothing household consumption in environments characterized by income volatility. We use comparable individual data on about 1.1 million women in 63 developing and transition...