A Citizen's Income - an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income for every individual - would offer many advantages, but because the UK's current benefits and tax systems are complex, transition to a benefits system based on a Citizen's Income could be difficult to achieve. This paper builds on...

We investigate the impact of the Romanian and Czech family policy systems on the income distribution and poverty risk of families with children. We focus on separating out the effects of the policy design itself, size of the benefits and the interaction between policies and population...

Using the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD and Family Resources Survey, we investigate what would have happened to child poverty in the UK in the periods 2010/11-2015/16 and 2015/16-2020/21 under a range of different indexation scenarios of children's benefits. We find that between...

There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest...

A number of developing country governments have introduced ambitious anti-poverty programs in recent years, but the dynamic effects of these initiatives on governments' election performance remain poorly understood. Especially in contexts with low program implementation quality, public support...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

Evaluation studies on conditional cash transfers (CCT) in the Philippines found small if not insignificantly different from zero effects on household consumption. We use propensity score matching to examine how recipients made use of the money they received, taking into account possible changes...

Public works programs in developing countries can reduce poverty in the long term and help low-skilled workers cope with economic shocks in the short term. But success depends on a scheme’s design and implementation. Key design factors are: properly identifying the target population; selecting...

We investigate the relative contributions of migrant and native households to welfare states. Using two step Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions that control for selection into benefit take-up, we are able to identify the individual variables contributing to differences in welfare receipt by native...

We investigate whether the dependence of immigrants on welfare benefits leads to opposition to further immigration by natives and immigrants in a pooled cross-section of 21 European countries for the 2004-2010 period. Explicitly controlling for the dependence of immigrants and natives on...