Documents payment of benefits 6 results

"Equivalence scales make adjustments to the incomes of households so that households with different compositions can be analysed. The effects of taxes and benefits on household income (ETB)analysis uses the McClements equivalence scale to examine how taxes and benefits redistribute income between households in the UK. However, many other household income statistics, including indicators published by the Department for Work and Pensions and the European Union (EU), use the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) equivalence scale. Thus, estimates produced in the ETB analysis cannot be easily compared with other key income statistics. This article seeks to outline the effects of switching to the OECD equivalence scale on the effects of taxes and benefits on household income analysis."

"Policy-makers in advanced welfare states have increasingly expressed concerns over large numbers of working-age people claiming social security support. Accordingly, policies aimed at reducing the level of “benefit dependency” have gained prominence. However, such policies rest on shaky empirical evidence. Systematic collections of national “caseload” data are rare, social security programmes overlap and administrative categories vary over time. The internationally inconsistent treatment of national transfer programmes provides a further challenge for cross-national comparisons. This article first identifies and discusses several of these problems, and ways in which they may be addressed. It then employs administrative claimant data from six European countries as a way of illustrating trends over time and across countries. The underlying aim is to explore the scientific potential of benefit recipient numbers as an indicator for welfare state change over time and across countries."

"Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers' return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major parental leave policy changes in Austria, we find that longer cash benefits lead to a significant delay in return to work and that the magnitude of this effect depends on the relative length of job protection and cash benefits. However, despite their impact on time on leave, we do not find a significant effect on mothers' labor market outcomes in the medium run, neither of benefit duration nor of job-protection duration. To understand the relative importance (and interaction) of the two policy instruments in shaping mothers' return to work behavior, we set up a non-stationary job search model in which cash benefits and job protection determine decisions of when to return to work and whether or not to return to the pre-birth employer. Despite its lean structure, the model does surprisingly well in matching empirically observed return to work profiles. The simulation of alternative counterfactual regimes shows that a policy that combines both job protection and benefits payments succeeds to induce mothers to spend some time with the child after birth without jeopardizing their medium run labor market attachment. "

"This article takes a critical view of the United Kingdom government's design for the delivery of the Universal Credit (UC) benefit reforms. It is argued that the UC is destined to fail because of the policy's extension into specifying the means (“digital by default”) of delivery for such services. The authors argue that an unseen but ubiquitous set of “scale” management assumptions has been allowed to infiltrate the means by which the government intends to enact its headline policy objective to “make work pay”. Following Seddon's “Vanguard Method”, a practical example of how a better service was designed in a local authority housing benefits service is then examined. Results from this service include being able to deal with up to 50 per cent more demand, with fewer resources, in half the official target time. Finally, the article will conclude with a call for more evidence-based policy."

"We study the propensity of persons with disabilities to engage in volunteer activity using the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS). Our principal focus is on the effects of various income support programs on persons with disabilities participation in volunteer activities because income support programs can differ with respect to their treatment of unpaid work. For example, workers' compensation programs embody strong disincentives to volunteering while public disability insurance programs explicitly encourage unpaid work. We find that workers' compensation is associated with decreases in the probability of volunteering while public disability insurance is associated with increases in the propensity to volunteer. The relevance of these results to both theories of volunteerism and public policy is discussed."

"The issue of welfare receipt by immigrants is highly controversial across Europe. In this paper, we assess whether immigrants are more likely to receive welfare payments relative to natives across a range of European countries. Using the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions for 2007, we find very little evidence that immigrants are indeed more likely to receive such payments when all payments are considered together. This is true whether we use raw data or regression analysis in which we control for relevant characteristics. We do find evidence of higher rates of poverty among immigrants. When combined with the results on welfare receipt, this raises a question over the effectiveness of welfare systems in protecting immigrants from poverty across Europe."