Are Two Carrots Better Than One? The Effects of Adding Employment Services to Financial Incentive Programs for Welfare Recipients (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making work pay: Final report on the self sufficiency project for long-term welfare recipients
2002
A little more than a decade ago, a number of senior federal government officials in the then Department of Employment and Immigration had an idea. Deputy Minister, Arthur Kroeger; Barry Carin, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy; and Louise Bourgault, Director General, Innovations Branch, wanted to develop a demonstration project that would show the effects that a "make work pay" strategy would have on the ability of long-term welfare recipients to make the transition to full-time employment. This initial concept was developed in partnership with two innovative leaders within provincial governments-Don Boudreau, Assistant Deputy Minister in the New Brunswick Department of Income Assistance; and Bob Cronin, Assistant Deputy Minister in the British Columbia Ministry of Social Services. Through this collaboration, this innovative idea became the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP). When SSP was launched in 1992, it was an ambitious undertaking in many respects. SSP would last 10 years and involve more than 9,000 lone-parent families in two provinces. It would use a complex design to enrol participants in three linked research samples and employ a random assignment evaluation design-widely viewed as the most reliable way to measure program impacts, but a method that has been rarely used in social policy research in Canada. Most important, SSP undertook the challenging task of trying simultaneously to reduce poverty, encourage steady work, and reduce welfare dependency. In general, programs that transfer income to poor people in order to fight poverty reduce the incentive for recipients to seek and accept employment, particularly if their potential earnings are low. Many of those who leave welfare for work end up in jobs that pay too little to allow their families to escape poverty. The program that the Self-Sufficiency Project set out to test aimed to encourage work and independence among welfare recipients, while ensuring that they had adequate incomes to support themselves and their families. The report's analyses relied on information from many people. At Statistics Canada, Richard Veevers, Ann Brown, and their staff collected and processed the survey and administrative records for this report. Sharon Manson Singer, Robin Ciceri, and their staff at British Columbia's Ministry of Human Resources, and Bernard Paulin, Gary Baird, and their staff at Family and Community ServicesâNew Brunswick have given valuable assistance regarding the income assistance system in the two provinces. For maintaining the program's management information system, which kept track of supplement payments and issued supplement cheques, we thank Melony McGuire and Trudy Megeny at EDS Systemhouse Inc. in Nova Scotia.
1998
The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) is a Canadian social demonstration and research project designed to test an employment alternative to welfare. The SSP makes work pay by offering generous earnings supplements to long-term, single-parent welfare recipients who find full-time jobs and leave Canada's Income Assistance (IA) welfare system. The SSP's effects (both intended and unintended) were examined in a special study called the SSP Entry Effects Demonstration, which was based on a classic experimental research design. New recipients were randomly assigned either to: (1) a program group that was informed of SSP's earnings supplement and'told that they could receive it if they remained on IA for 1 year, or (2) to a control group that was not eligible for supplement payments. Thirteen months later, the delayed exit effect of the new earnings supplement remained small (only 3.1%). Moreover, its effects grew only slightly over time. Even among those who were most knowledgeable about SSP's future earnings supplement offer, impacts remained fairly small, and SSP's 1-year eligibility restriction proved to limit both delayed exits from IA and new applicant entry effects. (Contains 10 tables/figures and 29 references.) (MN)
1997
The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) entry effect experiment was designed to measure the effect of the future availability of an earnings supplement on the behavior of newly enrolled income assistance (IA) recipients. It used a classical randomized design. From a sample of 3,315 single parents who recently started a new period of IA, one-half were assigned to the program group and were informed that if they remained on IA for the next 12 months they would be eligible for the SSP supplement; the other half were assigned to the control group. SSP group members were asked questions and attended focus-group interviews to verify they understood the nature of the SSP supplement offer. Results indicated between one-half and three-fourths of them had relatively precise knowledge. The primary focus of the experiment was to determine whether some individuals would prolong their stay on IA to gain SSP eligibility. Analysis of the delayed exit effect suggested it was fairly small, on the order of 3 percentage points, i.e. 3 percent of all new applicants for IA. (Appendixes include additional data tables and list of 21 references.) (YLB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
The impact of the Self-Sufficiency Project on the employment behaviour of former welfare recipients
The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian randomized trial in which the program group had 12 months to find full-time employment in order to qualify for a subsidy that roughly doubled their pre-tax earnings for the next three years. We find evidence of significant impacts of SSP on non-employment and employment durations. For the treated group, simulation results show an impact on the employment rate at 52 months after random assignment in the range of 7 to 11 percentage points; this is approximately a 25% increase in the employment rate compared with having no treatment in place. JEL classification: I38, J64
Assessing the Impact of a Wage Subsidy for Single Parents on Social Assistance in Canada
Cahiers de recherche, 2009
Assessing the Impact of a Wage Subsidy for Single Parents on Social Assistance in Canada * In 2002 the Quebec government implemented the "Action Emploi" (AE) program aimed at making work pay for long-term social assistance recipients (SA). AE offered a generous wage subsidy that could last up to three years to recipients who found a full-time job within twelve months. The program was implemented on an experimental basis for a single year. Based on little empirical evidence, a slightly modified version of the program was implemented on permanent basis in May 2008. The paper investigates the impact of the temporary program by focusing on the labour market transitions of the targeted population starting one year before the implementation of the program and up until the end of 2005. We use a multi-state multi-episode model. The endogeneity of the participation status is accounted for by treating AE as a distinct state and by allowing correlated unobserved factors to affect the transitions. The model is estimated by the method of simulated moments. Our results show that AE has indeed increased the duration of Off-SA spells and decreased the duration of SA spells slightly. There is also some evidence that the response to the program varies considerably with unobserved individual characteristics.
Journal of Public Economics, 2005
This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time employment, earnings, and income, and reduced poverty. Furthermore, at the end of the period discussed in this paper, the program was paying for itself through increased tax revenues. D 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V. JEL classification: I38