This paper reviews how income-support systems affect labour force participation in the UK. The UK's approach to social insurance is "basic security", with modest, typically flat-rate, benefits; insurance-based benefits are relatively unimportant. Compared with the EU, the UK has high employment...

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...

The paper examines social transfers and their influence on the labour supply of women in Kyrgyzstan. Social transfers in cash and in kind in place in Kyrgyzstan absorbed 5.7% of GDP in 2012. They include subsidies to social insurance pensioners, transfers to population groups considered...

This paper examines a broad set of short- and long-term impacts of Individual Placement and Support (IPS) for disability benefit recipients with severe mental disabilities. IPS is a specific intervention that first aims to place an individual in employment and subsequently trains the worker on...

We study the impact of a national cash transfer program in Vietnam on labor supply using large household surveys and a regression-discontinuity design based on discontinuity in age eligibility. We do not find evidence of a disincentive effect of the cash transfer on labor supply for adults aged...

Reducing poverty remains an important challenge, and the COVID-19-crisis may further reinforce social vulnerabilities. Although it has declined lately, relative poverty remains high in international comparison and is distributed unevenly across population groups with the elderly, people with...

In this paper, we estimate the impact on female labor force participation of a massive conditional cash transfer program-Universal Child Allowance, AUH-launched in Argentina in 2009. We identify the intention-to-treat effect by comparing eligible and non-eligible women over time through a...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross-country perspective on the redistributive...

The basic economic model of labor supply has a very clear prediction of what we should expect when an adult receives an unexpected cash windfall: they should work less and earn less. This intuition underlies concerns that many types of cash transfers, ranging from government benefits to migrant...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, by employing a macro-level institutional dataset on benefit levels for social assistance (SA) and minimum income protection (MIP) in 22 European countries in the period 1990–2013, I show that the adequacy of income support for...