IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mia/wpaper/0713.html

Are Two Carrots Better Than One? The Effects of Adding Employment Services to Financial Incentive Programs for Welfare Recipients

Author

Listed:
  • Phillip K. Robins

    (Department of Economics, University of Miami)

  • Charles Michalopoulos

    (MDRC)

  • Kelly Foley

    (University of British Columbia)

Abstract

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a social experiment conducted in two provinces in Canada during the 1990s that tested a generous financial incentive program for welfare recipients. A little-known subsidiary experiment, called SSP Plus, had a three-way design that tested the incremental effect of adding employment services to the generous financial incentive program. Employment services are viewed by many welfare analysts as an important component of an overall strategy for helping welfare recipients escape poverty and achieve stable employment. This paper presents the results of the SSP Plus experiment. Adding employment services encouraged more people to take up the earnings supplement, and it appeared to have long-term effects on full-time employment and welfare receipt. This might be because the services improved the jobs people obtained. Both earnings and wage rates were higher compared to earnings and wages without the services and the jobs held appeared to be more sustainable.

Suggested Citation

  • Phillip K. Robins & Charles Michalopoulos & Kelly Foley, 2006. "Are Two Carrots Better Than One? The Effects of Adding Employment Services to Financial Incentive Programs for Welfare Recipients," Working Papers 0713, University of Miami, Department of Economics, revised Oct 2007.
    • Handle: RePEc:mia:wpaper:0713
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Dorsett, Richard, 2014. "The effect of temporary in-work support on employment retention: Evidence from a field experiment," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 61-71.
    2. Alexander Spermann, 2015. "How to fight long-term unemployment: lessons from Germany," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 4(1), pages 1-15, December.
    3. Dr Richard Dorsett, 2013. "Can Post-Employment Services Combined with Financial Incentives Improve Employment Retention for Welfare Recipients? Evidence from the Texas Employment Retention and Advancement Evaluation," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 409, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    4. Richard Hendra & James Riccio & Richard Dorsett & Philip Robins, 2015. "Breaking the low pay, no pay cycle: the effects of the UK Employment Retention and Advancement programme," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 4(1), pages 1-32, December.
    5. Stephen A. Wandner, 2016. "Wage Insurance as a Policy Option in the United States," Upjohn Working Papers 16-250, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
    6. Christopher J. O'Leary, 2015. "Use of Unemployment Insurance and Public Employment Services after Leaving Welfare," Upjohn Working Papers 15-235, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
    7. Dr Richard Dorsett, 2013. "Can Post-Employment Services Combined with Financial Incentives Improve Employment Retention for Welfare Recipients? Evidence from the Texas Employment Retention and Advancement Evaluation," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 409, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    8. Nathan Berg & Todd Gabel, 2013. "Effects of New Welfare Reform Strategies on Welfare Participation: Microdata Estimates from Canada," Working Papers 1304, University of Otago, Department of Economics, revised Feb 2013.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    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:mia:wpaper:0713. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Daniela Valdivia (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/demiaus.html .

    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.