IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/6449.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Would Financial Incentives for Leaving Welfare Lead Some People to Stay on Welfare Longer? An Experimental Evaluation of 'Entry Effects' in the SSP

Author

Listed:
  • David Card
  • Philip K. Robins
  • Winston Lin

Abstract

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) is a large scale social experiment being conducted in Canada to evaluate the effects of an earnings supplement (or subsidy) for long-term welfare recipients who find a full-time job and leave income assistance. The supplement is available to single parents who have received income assistance for a year or more, and typically doubles the gross take-home pay of recipients. A critical issue in the evaluation of SSP is whether the availability of the supplement would lead some new income assistance recipients to prolong their stay on welfare in order to gain eligibility. A separate experiment was conducted to measure the magnitude of this effect. One half of a group of new applicants was informed that they would be eligible to receive SSP if they stayed on income assistance for a year; the other half was randomly assigned to a control group. Our analysis indicates a very modest exit

Suggested Citation

  • David Card & Philip K. Robins & Winston Lin, 1998. "Would Financial Incentives for Leaving Welfare Lead Some People to Stay on Welfare Longer? An Experimental Evaluation of 'Entry Effects' in the SSP," NBER Working Papers 6449, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6449
    Note: LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w6449.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Moffitt, Robert, 1992. "Incentive Effects of the U.S. Welfare System: A Review," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 30(1), pages 1-61, March.
    2. David Card & Philip K. Robins, 1996. "Do Financial Incentives Encourage Welfare Recipients to Work? Early Findings from the Canadian Self Sufficiency Project," Working Papers 738, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    3. repec:fth:prinin:359 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Keeley, Michael C, et al, 1978. "The Estimation of Labor Supply Models Using Experimental Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 68(5), pages 873-887, December.
    5. LaLonde, Robert J, 1986. "Evaluating the Econometric Evaluations of Training Programs with Experimental Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(4), pages 604-620, September.
    6. BRADLEY R. Schiller & C. NIELSEN Brasher, 1993. "Effects Of Workfare Saturation On Afdc Caseloads," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 11(2), pages 39-49, April.
    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. Robert Moffitt, 2002. "The role of randomized field trials in social science research: a perspective from evaluations of reforms of social welfare programs," CeMMAP working papers 23/02, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    2. Robert A. Moffitt, 2003. "The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program," NBER Chapters, in: Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, pages 291-364, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Card, David, 2000. "Reforming the Financial Incentives of the Welfare System," IZA Discussion Papers 172, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Charles Michalopoulos & Philip K. Robins, 2001. "Using financial incentives to encourage welfare recipients to become economically self-sufficient," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue Sep, pages 105-123.

    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. Card, David & Robins, Philip K., 2005. "How important are "entry effects" in financial incentive programs for welfare recipients? Experimental evidence from the Self-Sufficiency Project," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 125(1-2), pages 113-139.
    2. Fortin, Bernard, 1997. "Dépendance à l’égard de l’aide sociale et réforme de la sécurité du revenu," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 73(4), pages 557-573, décembre.
    3. Blundell, Richard & Macurdy, Thomas, 1999. "Labor supply: A review of alternative approaches," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 27, pages 1559-1695, Elsevier.
    4. Gary Burtless, 1995. "The Case for Randomized Field Trials in Economic and Policy Research," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(2), pages 63-84, Spring.
    5. Lawrence F. Katz, 1996. "Wage Subsidies for the Disadvantaged," NBER Working Papers 5679, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Rothstein, Jesse & Von Wachter, Till, 2016. "Social Experiments in the Labor Market," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt7957p9g6, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    7. Grossbard, Shoshana, 1993. "On the Economics of Marriage - A Theory of Marriage, Labor and Divorce. Out of print. Published originally by Westview Press in 1993 under name Grossbard-Shechtman," MPRA Paper 81059, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Cockx, Bart & Ridder, Geert, 2001. "Social Employment of Welfare Recipients in Belgium: An Evaluation," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 111(470), pages 322-352, April.
    9. Martin D. Dooley, 1999. "The Evolution of Welfare Participation Among Canadian Lone Mothers From 1973-1991," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 32(3), pages 589-612, May.
    10. Alisa C. Lewin & Eric Maurin, 2005. "The Effect of Family Size on Incentive Effects of Welfare Transfers in Two-Parent Families," Evaluation Review, , vol. 29(6), pages 507-529, December.
    11. Baird, Matthew D. & Engberg, John & Gutierrez, Italo A., 2022. "RCT evidence on differential impact of US job training programmes by pre-training employment status," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    12. Howard Chernick, 1998. "Fiscal Effects of Block Grants for the Needy: An Interpretation of the Evidence," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 5(2), pages 205-233, May.
    13. Chien-Chung Huang, 2001. "The Impact of Child Support Enforcement on Nonmarital and Marital Births: Does It Differ by Racial and Age Groups?," JCPR Working Papers 246, Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.
    14. Bernard Fortin, 1998. "Dépendance à l'égard de l'aide sociale et réforme de la sécurité du revenu," CIRANO Working Papers 98s-03, CIRANO.
    15. Dettmann, E. & Becker, C. & Schmeißer, C., 2011. "Distance functions for matching in small samples," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 55(5), pages 1942-1960, May.
    16. David Card, 2022. "Design-Based Research in Empirical Microeconomics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(6), pages 1773-1781, June.
    17. James J. Heckman, 1991. "Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation Revisited," NBER Technical Working Papers 0107, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Jeffrey Smith, 2000. "A Critical Survey of Empirical Methods for Evaluating Active Labor Market Policies," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 136(III), pages 247-268, September.
    19. Gordon Dahl, 2010. "Early teen marriage and future poverty," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 47(3), pages 689-718, August.
    20. Hayashi, Masayoshi, 2014. "Forecasting welfare caseloads: The case of the Japanese public assistance program," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 105-114.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    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:nbr:nberwo:6449. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.