IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v42y2018i5p1417-1434..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) benefit sanctions and labour market outcomes in Britain, 2001–2014

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Taulbut
  • Daniel F Mackay
  • Gerry McCartney

Abstract

The dominant view among British policy-makers is that benefit sanctions for the unemployed who are claiming the Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) are effective at increasing flows from unemployment into sustainable employment. This paper tests this theory using aggregate cross-sectional data for Great Britain for the period May 2001 to December 2014. Descriptive analysis found the relationship between sanctions and labour market outcomes was ambiguous, while trends in labour market outcomes were highly correlated with labour market demand. Multivariate SVAR time-series analysis, controlling for labour market demand, found evidence that changes in the threat and use of sanctions had a positive impact on flows into work in the short run but not in the long term, and had no definitive impact on ILO unemployment at all. Interrupted time-series analyses suggest we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the impact of introduction of a new JSA sanctions regime in October 2012 (with higher financial penalties associated with being sanctioned) had no impact on flows into work from JSA. In Britain, intensifying the use of sanctions and introducing harsher penalties associated with being sanctioned has been largely ineffective at increasing flows from JSA into sustainable employment. Given the negative financial and social impacts of sanctions on those affected, and the lack of evidence of a sustained positive impact on employment, the basis for the new sanctions policy is unclear.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Taulbut & Daniel F Mackay & Gerry McCartney, 2018. "Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) benefit sanctions and labour market outcomes in Britain, 2001–2014," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 42(5), pages 1417-1434.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:42:y:2018:i:5:p:1417-1434.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bex088
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jennifer C. Smith, 2011. "The Ins and Outs of UK Unemployment," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(552), pages 402-444, May.
    2. Reeves, Aaron, 2017. "Does sanctioning disabled claimants of unemployment insurance increase labour market inactivity? An analysis of 346 British local authorities between 2009 and 2014," SocArXiv ztgdq, Center for Open Science.
    3. Danielle Venn, 2012. "Eligibility Criteria for Unemployment Benefits: Quantitative Indicators for OECD and EU Countries," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 131, OECD Publishing.
    4. repec:aei:rpaper:25670 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sung‐Eun Cho & Young‐Min Lee, 2020. "The Effects of Youth Job Seeker Allowance in South Korea," Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, The Crawford School, The Australian National University, vol. 34(2), pages 64-77, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Elsby, Michael W.L. & Hobijn, Bart & Şahin, Ayşegül, 2015. "On the importance of the participation margin for labor market fluctuations," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 64-82.
    2. Marta Silva & José Garcia-Louzão, 2021. "Coworker Networks and the Labor Market Outcomes of Displaced Workers: Evidence from Portugal," Working Papers w202121, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    3. Robert Dixon & G. C. Lim & Jan C. van Ours, 2015. "The effect of shocks to labour market flows on unemployment and participation rates," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(24), pages 2523-2539, May.
    4. Pizzinelli, Carlo & Speigner, Bradley, 2017. "Matching efficiency and labour market heterogeneity in the United Kingdom," Bank of England working papers 667, Bank of England.
    5. Cairo, Sofie & Mahlstedt, Robert, 2021. "Transparency of the Welfare System and Labor Market Outcomes of Unemployed Workers," IZA Discussion Papers 14940, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Portugal, Pedro & Rua, António, 2018. "Zooming the Ins and Outs of the U.S. Unemployment with a Wavelet Lens," IZA Discussion Papers 11559, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Vassilis Monastiriotis & Angelo Martelli, 2021. "Crisis, Adjustment and Resilience in the Greek Labor Market: An Unemployment Decomposition Approach," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 44(1), pages 85-112, January.
    8. Herwig Immervoll & Stefano Scarpetta, 2012. "Activation and employment support policies in OECD countries. An overview of current approaches," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 1(1), pages 1-20, December.
    9. Ronald Bachmann & Daniel Baumgarten, 2013. "How do the unemployed search for a job? – Evidence from the EU Labour Force Survey," IZA Journal of European Labor Studies, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 2(1), pages 1-25, December.
    10. Simon Jäger & Benjamin Schoefer & Samuel Young & Josef Zweimüller, 2020. "Wages and the Value of Nonemployment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 135(4), pages 1905-1963.
    11. Pedro S. Martins, 2015. "Working to get fired? Regression discontinuity effects of unemployment benefit eligibility on prior employment duration," Working Papers 61, Queen Mary, University of London, School of Business and Management, Centre for Globalisation Research.
    12. Daniel Gutknecht, 2013. "Testing for Monotonicity under Endogeneity An Application to the Reservation Wage Function," Economics Series Working Papers 673, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    13. Silva, José I. & Vázquez-Grenno, Javier, 2013. "The ins and outs of unemployment in a two-tier labor market," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 161-169.
    14. Eduardo Zylberstajn & André Portela Souza, 2016. "The Ins And Outs Of Unemployment In A Dual Labor Market," Anais do XLIII Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 43rd Brazilian Economics Meeting] 227, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    15. Thorleifsson, Oskar, 2021. "Unemployment Dynamics in the Nordics : Is there Heterogeneity in the Relative Importance of Ins and Outs?," Warwick-Monash Economics Student Papers 22, Warwick Monash Economics Student Papers.
    16. Immervoll, Herwig, 2012. "Reforming the Benefit System to 'Make Work Pay': Options and Priorities in a Weak Labour Market," IZA Policy Papers 50, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Amine Samir, 2016. "The Canadian Unemployment Insurance Generosity: Reflections from a Comparative Analysis," Comparative Economic Research, Sciendo, vol. 19(3), pages 133-145, September.
    18. Knotz, Carlo Michael, 2012. "Measuring the 'new balance of rights and responsibilities' in labor market policy: A quantitative overview of activation strategies in 20 OECD countries," Working papers of the ZeS 06/2012, University of Bremen, Centre for Social Policy Research (ZeS).
    19. Cappellari, Lorenzo & Jenkins, Stephen P., 2014. "Earnings and labour market volatility in Britain, with a transatlantic comparison," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 201-211.
    20. Petr Maleček, 2014. "Toky dlouhodobé nezaměstnanosti [Long-Term Unemployment Flows]," Politická ekonomie, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2014(4), pages 560-576.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:42:y:2018:i:5:p:1417-1434.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.