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Our study aims to analyze and learn from the unanticipated economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine the ramifications of the pandemic on household well-being in Ethiopia, uncovering the layers of socio-economic impact through a rigorous microsimulation exercise. Drawing on robust data from the 2018/19 Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture, we assess the significant disruptions caused by the pandemic. Our findings reveal a 2 to 4 percentage point increase in the poverty rate within the first three months, driven largely by shifts in direct incomes and food prices. The analysis highlights differential impacts across rural and urban areas, as well as between male- and female-headed households. Moreover, the study underscores the vital role of social protection programs in mitigating the effects of such shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Rising reports of suicidal behaviors in children and adolescents have led to the recognition of a youth mental health crisis. However, reported rates can be influenced by access to screening and changes in reporting conventions, as well as by changes in social stigma. Using data on all hospital visits in New Jersey for 2008–2019, we investigate two inflection points in adolescent suicide-related visits and show that a rise in 2012 followed changes in screening recommendations, while a sharp rise in 2016–2017 followed changes in the coding of suicidal ideation. Rates of other suicidal behaviors, including self-harm, attempted suicides, and completed suicides were essentially flat over this period. These results suggest that underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest. Hence, researchers should approach reported trends cautiously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data from a long-running experiment in which American Indian households received income transfers from a casino, while other households did not. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, we find that the treated children had fewer depression and anxiety symptoms at age 30. In adulthood, individuals with more years of treatment exposure also had greater economic well-being around age 30. The untreated children, in adulthood, showed strong persistence in measures of mental health from adolescence through age 30, while in the treated group, children persistence was greatly attenuated. The estimated effects are slightly stronger for treated children who experienced fewer mental health symptoms before the transfers began at ages 16 and 21, but by age 30, all affected children showed reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression and improved economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of pension schemes is crucial in determining savings behavior. The impact of pension schemes on saving rates across countries remains to be an intriguing empirical question considering the complicated nature of the relationship between saving patterns and pension wealth. This paper investigates the effect of the private pension contributions on savings rates in 25 selected OECD countries between the period 2001–2019 by employing quantile regression analysis which takes the heterogeneity of the data into account and provides information about not only the midpoint but also the extreme points of the distribution. According to the results, the savings rate is negatively associated with private pensions at all quantile levels. The empirical findings indicate that pension contributions tend to be strong substitutes for voluntary savings in countries with low tendencies to save. This result is especially important for its policy design implications as the policy makers tend to provide incentives either in the form of tax reliefs or direct substitutions for private pension contributions with the motivation to raise domestic savings.

Using microsimulation tools, we explore the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis, and their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. During the Great Recession, the focus was on cost reduction. By contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, the focus was on mitigating the impact on household incomes. In addition, an innovation in joint public and private responses emerged through social partnership. We find a stronger policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than the Great Recession. The COVID-19 crisis was more rapid, leaving more individuals out of work, thus family support was weaker. This was compensated by stronger private support through social partnership. Consequently, those with lower incomes had larger disposable incomes at the onset of the crisis; an effect that reduced with policy learning. We find increasing trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately measuring government benefit receipt in household surveys is necessary when studying disadvantaged populations and welfare programs. The Food Stamp Program is especially important given its size and recent growth. To validate survey reports, we link administrative data on participation in two states to three key household surveys. We find that between 23 and 50 percent of true food stamp recipient households do not report receipt. A substantial number of true nonrecipients are also recorded as recipients. We examine reasons for these errors, including imputation, an important source of error. Error rates vary with household characteristics, implying complicated biases in multivariate analyses, such as regressions. We directly examine biases in common survey-based estimates of program receipt by comparing them to estimates from our linked data. We find that the survey estimates understate participation among single parents, nonwhites, and low-income households and also lead to errors in multiple program receipt and time and age patterns of receipt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the level and distribution of compensation for households with children provided by child support policies in Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. The child support policies in which we are interested include child and large family benefits, subsistence and housing benefits, and tax relief for dependent children. Using a microsimulation technique of "policy importing", we show that the adequacy and evenness of the Croatian child support could be substantially improved if Croatia's current policies were replaced by their Slovenian and Austrian equivalents. We propose improved versions of Verbist and Van Lancker's (Soc Indic Res 128(3):1299–1318, 2016) indicator of horizontal equity in the sense of construction, aggregation to the population level and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model to evaluate the aggregate impact of college finance in an environment with entrepreneurship. The calibrated model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable in the United States. The calibration indicates this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college‐educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints if and when they eventually become entrepreneurs. Changes in financing constraints on entrepreneurs can thus affect college attendance, and changes in financing constraints on college can affect entrepreneurship rates as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies linking household surveys to administrative records reveal high rates of misreporting of program receipt. We use the FoodAPS survey to examine whether the findings of these studies of general household surveys using one or two states generalize to a survey with a narrow focus and across many states. First, we study how reporting errors differ from other surveys. We find a lower rate of false negatives (failures to report true receipt) in FoodAPS, likely partly due to the shorter recall period of FoodAPS. Misreporting varies with household characteristics and between interviewers. Second, we examine geographic heterogeneity in survey error to assess whether we can extrapolate from linked data from a few states. We find systematic differences between states in unconditional error rates but no evidence of substantial differences conditional on common covariates. Thus, extrapolating error rates across states may yield more accurate receipt estimates than uncorrected survey estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the impact of increasing the female early retirement age (ERA) on household living standards. Examining the increase in the female ERA from 60 to 63 in the UK, we find increased earnings only partially offset lost public pension income, leaving affected women's household incomes £32 per week lower on average. The proportional effect was substantially larger for women in lower income households. This increased the income poverty rate among affected women by 6.4 percentage points. We find no evidence of an increased inability to afford important material items, potentially suggesting that material deprivation has been avoided through smoothing of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of Tunisia's tax and transfer system on inequality and poverty and assesses the benefits from public spending on education and health. Results show that Tunisia's redistributive fiscal policy reduces inequality and extreme poverty significantly. However, based on the national poverty line, the headcount ratio increases, implying that a large number of the poor people pay more in taxes than they receive in cash transfers and subsidies. This is due to a relatively high burden of personal income taxes and social security contributions for low‐income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable number of studies have been conducted to measure and analyze the phenomenon of the non‐take‐up of social assistance. However, the homeless portion of this population has long remained outside the scope of this research, so that little is known about their non‐take‐up behavior. In this paper, we focus on this population using a French national survey and we derive measures for the non‐take‐up of French basic income support. Our findings indicate that there is a substantial rate of non‐take‐up among the homeless, but that this rate is lower than that for the general population: approximately 18% of eligible homeless persons do not claim benefits compared to 35% of the general population. Using a large set of variables, we investigate the determinants of non‐take‐up. We show that although some of these determinants are shared with the general population, as identified in the literature, the homeless population exhibits some particularities. Furthermore, our results also suggest that the poorest of the homeless have a larger non‐take‐up rate than other homeless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effect of differential access to financial markets, discount factor and wealth endowment on poverty and inequality. We construct a model of educational and savings choice with heterogeneous agents. Motivated by empirical evidence, in this economy the return on savings is a non-decreasing function of the amount saved. As expected, more patient households tend to become wealthier and more educated. The heterogeneity on portfolio returns is shown to be key to our main result: the model closely fits the data on income and wealth inequalities, being able to explain the existing Brazil’s inequality patterns. The model was also calibrated to the US, with similar fit. We then evaluate two types of public policies based on cash transfer schemes (CTSs), that aim to reduce poverty and inequality. We find that the CTS version in which receiving the benefit is conditional on educating the household’s youngster outperforms its unconditional version in almost all dimensions analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative income, indexed by a parameter beta in a utility function that is a convex combination of (absolute) income and low relative income. Assuming that the redistribution comes at a cost (because only a fraction of a taxed income can be transferred), we find that there exists a critical level of beta below which different isoelastic social planners choose different optimal allocations of incomes. However, if beta is above that critical level, all isoelastic social planners choose the same allocation of incomes because they then find that an equal distribution of incomes maximizes social welfare regardless of the magnitude of alpha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for individuals not to take up welfare benefits. The most common explanation is that people make a rational choice between the utility they expect from the benefit and the effort required to take-up. Most studies utilize surveys, which are subject to misreporting and measurement errors, to determine eligibility and non-take-up rates. This study uses a novel dataset based on administrative data sources, which provides a more accurate identification of eligible households and take-up. Furthermore, this study documents non-take-up of a compensation to which nearly 5 million Dutch households are entitled. The richness of the data allowed us to conduct a detailed analysis of key drivers of non-take-up. The analysis largely confirms the transaction-costs hypotheses. However, we found an unexpected effect. Although, in general, the probability of take-up increases when income decreases, those with the lowest income or wealth do not have the highest probability of take-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of cash social benefits on work incentives across the income distribution and among selected model family types in Lithuania. The analysis of work incentives was carried out for 2005–2013 based on a combination of measures estimated using the EUROMOD tax–benefit microsimulation model. The analysis revealed high disincentives to work at the bottom of the income distribution, dominated by the effect of cash social benefits compared to taxes or social insurance contributions. A strong trade-off between benefit adequacy and work incentives is built into the design of the national cash benefit system, particularly social assistance. The challenge for policy design is thus to encourage active labour market participation among low earners without eroding the minimum income protection floor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perform the first comprehensive fiscal incidence analyses in Brazil and the U. S., including direct cash and food transfers, targeted housing and heating subsidies, public spending on health and education, and taxes on personal income, payroll, corporate income, property, and expenditures. The countries share a number of similarities that make the comparison interesting, including high levels of inequality given their levels of development, high inequality of opportunity, large and racially diverse populations, and similar sizes of government. The U. S. achieves higher redistribution through direct taxes and transfers, primarily because Brazil underutilizes personal income taxes and keeps its progressive cash and food transfer programs small, while its larger transfer programs are less progressive. When public spending on health and non-tertiary education is added to income using the government cost approach, however, the two countries achieve similar levels of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines poverty dynamics in Turkey using a nationally representative panel data covering the 2005-08 period. The aim is to understand mobility in and out of poverty and its correlates. We find that almost a quarter of the poor are persistently poor. The conditional and unconditional exit rates that we estimate are within the range of values reported for developed countries in the literature. That the income events-but not transfers-dominate both poverty entries and exits is indicative of the major role labor markets play in the lives of the poor. In particular, we argue that given the characteristics of the poor and modest levels of social assistance, the reason for mobility rates close to European averages must be sought in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-)distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD countries between 1981 and 1998. The evidence indicates that presidential regimes are associated with a less equal distribution of disposable incomes, while electoral systems have no significant effects. Fiscal competition is associated with less income redistribution and a less equal distribution of disposable incomes, but also with a more equal primary income distribution. Our evidence also is in line with earlier empirical contributions that find a positive relationship between trade openness and equality in primary and disposable incomes, as well as the overall redistributive effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]