Sickness Absence and Local Benefit Cultures In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by observable socioeconomic factors. In this paper we investigate whe...

Are Youths on Income Support Less Happy? Evidence from Australia The central research question addressed in this paper is how receipt of income support payments affects the well-being of youths. Using 1997-2004 panel data from a nationally representative survey of Australian youths, we attempt to estimate the size of the welfare stigma faced by Australian youths, where stigma is defined as the ...

In this paper we examine the relationship between the timing of food stamp receipt and consumption patterns. We combine data on state distribution dates with scanner data on a panel of households. Consistent with previous work we find that purchases of a variety of goods are higher on receipt days. Additionally, we find that when receipt days are more likely to be on weekends, total monthly con...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program’s eligibi...

The Transition from Welfare to Work and the Role of Potential Labor Income It is often argued that the high level of welfare claims in Germany causes little incentive for workers with low productivity to seek for a job. We examine the influence of the ratio between estimated potential labor income and the welfare payment level on the probability of leaving social welfare. Using the GSOEP, we es...

Perspectives from the Happiness Literature and the Role of New Instruments for Policy Analysis After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21 century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the assumption ...

Data from 76 experimental welfare-to-work programs conducted in the United States between 1983 and 1998 are used to investigate whether the impacts of such programs on employment had been improving over time and whether specific program features influencing such changes can be identified. Over the period, an increasing percentage of control group members received services similar to those offer...

Heterogeneous Impacts in PROGRESA The “common effect” model in program evaluation assumes that all treated individuals have the same impact from a program. Our paper contributes to the recent literature that tests and goes beyond the common effect model by investigating impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental evaluation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA. Ou...

The Heterogeneous Impact of Pension Income on Elderly Living Arrangements: Evidence from China’s New Rural Pension Scheme This paper investigates the impact of pension income on living arrangements of the elderly. Taking advantage of a unique opportunity due to the recent establishment and expansion of the social pension system in rural China, we explicitly address the endogeneity of pension st...

Cash Transfers and Child Labour Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labour is prevalent. Even if many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children’s welfare, in theory their impact on child labour is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the impact of cash transfers, conditional and unconditional, on child labour...