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Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty, on top of many other benefits, including greatly reduced administrative complexity and cost. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential poverty-reducing impact of BI strongly depends on exactly how and where it is implemented. Implementing a BI requires far more choices than advocates seem to realize. The level at which the BI is set matters, but its exact specification matters even more. Which parts of the existing tax-benefit system are maintained, and which parts are abolished, modified or replaced? The impact of a BI, be it a low or a high one, thus strongly depends on the characteristics of the system that it is (partially) replacing or complementing, as well as the socio-economic context in which it is introduced. Some versions of BI could potentially help to reduce poverty but always at a significant cost and with substantial sections of the population incurring significant losses, which matters for political feasibility. A partial basic income complementing existing provisions appears to make more potential sense than a full basic income replacing them. The simplicity of BI, however, tends to be vastly overstated.

International audience; The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people’s needs for old-age support raise the demand for children. We exploit the extension of social pensions in Namibia during the 1990s to provide a quasi-experimental quantification of this widespread idea. The reform eliminated inequalities in pension coverage and benefits across regions and ethnic groups. Combining differences in pre-reform pensions and differences in exposure across cohorts, we show that pensions substantially reduce fertility, especially in late reproductive life. The results suggest that improving social protection for the elderly could go a long way in fostering fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa. (JEL H55, I38, J13, J14, O15)

This paper studies the economic effects on re-employment and program substitution behavior among elderly displaced workers who exogenously lose eligibility for their early retirement option. We use detailed Norwegian matched employer-employee data containing information on bankruptcy dates and individual-level wealth, income, pensions and social security benefits. Our empirical strategy employs a regression discontinuity design, as job displacement before a certain age cut-off results in the loss of eligibility for early retirement benefits between ages 62–67 years in Norway. We find that re-employment rates are indistinguishable between workers who just retain eligibility for early retirement benefits and those who just do not. Meanwhile, those who lose eligibility offset 69% of their lost benefits through take-up of other social security benefits, where 51 percentage points comes from disability insurance and 13 percentage points from unemployment insurance. Our findings are particularly policy relevant as tightening of age-limits for old-age pensions is on the agenda in several OECD countries, while current economic hardship throughout the region may lead to increased job displacement for elderly workers.

The private pension system that was initiated in 2003 in Turkey included increasing employment by generating long term resources to the economy and contributing to economic development among its manifold aims. This paper investigates the effect of the private pension scheme on domestic savings in Turkey between the period 2003Q4-2018Q3. Bounds Test employed revealed that a cointegrating relationship exists between the private pension fund and domestic savings in Turkey. The ARDL model is used to examine the short and the long term relationship among the variables. Also the Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS), Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and Markov Switching Regression models are employed to check for robustness. It is concluded that private pension system does in fact contribute to domestic national savings in Turkey.

We examine the multigenerational impacts of a nationwide social pension program in China, the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS). NRPS was rolled out in full scale since 2012, and rural enrollees over age 60 are eligible to receive a minimum of 70 CNY non-contributory monthly pension. We leverage age eligibility and variations in pension receipt to identify the inter-generational effect of NRPS on health among grandchildren. We find NRPS substantially increases child weight without impacting height. Overall, child BMI z score increases by 1.09, which is largely driven by grandfathers' pension receipt raising rates of overweight and obesity among grandsons. Among the potential mechanisms, our findings are more plausibly explained by a mixture of income effect, son preference, and rising inter-generational co-residence and childcare.

The Finnish basic income experiment was an ambitious effort to study basic income in a Nordic welfare state. This paper describes the planning, implementation and scientific evaluation of the experiment. The randomized treatment group was paid a guaranteed monthly income, which had no impact on disposable income while a person was unemployed but provided a substantial increase in work incentives. We extend previous evaluations by examining the heterogeneity of incentive changes and employment responses across households. Our results reveal improvements in employment only for couples with children, providing an interesting contrast to other in-work credit programs.

In most disability insurance programs, beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. This paper develops a simple framework to evaluate this trade-off. It uses a reduction in the earnings limit in Hungary to examine screening and labor supply responses. The findings show that the policy changed selection into the program modestly, but it reduced labor supply significantly. Viewed through the lens of the model, these findings suggest that the earnings threshold should be higher.

Activation policies to promote self-sufficiency among recipients of welfare and other types of benefits are becoming more common in many welfare states. We evaluate a law change in Norway making welfare receipt conditional on participation in an activation program for all welfare recipients below the age of 30. Analyzing the program's staggered implementation across municipalities with several modern event study estimators, we estimate that the law change had quite precise 0-effects on benefit receipt, work and education. We also do not find any effects on the probability of being out of work or of being in employment, education or labor market programs. Qualitative evidence suggests that the zero effect may be due to the law change only impacting the participation of recipients with low expected gain from activation.

A basic function of public pension systems is to guarantee a satisfactory old-age income for short-sighted low earners. In proportional (i.e., earnings-related) systems, this requires a sufficiently high contribution rate. At the same time, there should be a cap on the pension contribution base to leave sufficient room for the efficient private savings of prudent high earners. Taking into account the dependence of life expectancy on the earnings (figuratively called longevity gap), a well-chosen cap has an additional advantage: it limits the unintended income redistribution from the short-lived to the long-lived. Our strongly stylized model is able to illustrate numerically the impact of the contribution rate and of the cap on the social welfare and the unintended income redistribution.

We evaluate the effects of a Supported Employment (SE) program aimed at Disability Insurance (DI) recipients with mental conditions. The program is characterized by a "work-first" approach, which includes intensive job coaching and follow-along support. Using a Randomized Control Trial with more than 660 participants over a follow-up period of 18 months, we compare the benefits of this newly introduced program to regular vocational rehabilitation services traditionally used in Belgium. We find that SE increases the probability that DI recipients with mental conditions work while on claim and reduces their reliance on DI benefits. Specifically, we estimate that 18 months after the start of their return-to-work program, participants in the SE group are 9.5 percentage points more likely to be working, and receive 6% less in DI benefits than those in the control group.

Social protection systems play a key stabilising role for individuals and societies, especially in the recent context of heightened uncertainties. Income stabilisation and related social policy objectives hinge on the extent to which social protection is accessible for those requiring support. This paper proposes a new empirical approach for quantifying the accessibility and value of income transfers following an earnings loss. It first presents a methodology for assessing support levels for jobless individuals in specific circumstances that allows for comparisons across countries and over time. It then illustrates the approach using longitudinal survey data in 16 OECD countries. The illustration focusses on differences in entitlements between people who were in "standard" and "non-standard" employment prior to joblessness. Results show that, prior to the COVID pandemic, income support gaps between standard and non-standard workers were often sizeable. For instance, in Korea, job losers with prior standard employment were nearly twice as likely to receive income support as otherwise similar individuals with a history of non-standard work. Gaps were also large in Italy and Portugal. By contrast, gaps were statistically insignificant in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United Kingdom. As these latter countries follow very different social protection strategies, results suggest that limiting support gaps for non-standard workers is achievable with different policy designs and targeting mechanisms.

Die Grünen wollen Hartz IV durch ein garantiertes Einkommen ersetzen, das höher ist als das derzeitige Arbeitslosengeld II und nach Einkommen, Vermögen und Bedarf gewährt wird, ansonsten aber bedingungslos und ohne Sanktionen ist. Aktive Beschäftigungspolitik und Mindesteinkommenspolitik sind in diesem Konzept strikt getrennt. Parteichef Robert Habeck schätzt die Kosten auf 30 Mrd. Euro, was eindeutig zu niedrig geschätzt ist. Die Auswirkungen auf den Arbeitsmarkt müssten berücksichtigt werden und die Finanzierung der Lebenshaltungskosten für Studierende würde ebenfalls in die öffentliche Verantwortung fallen.

Whether social transfers should be targeted or universal is an unsolved debate particularly relevant for the implementation of social protection schemes in developing countries. While the limited availability of public resources encourages targeting, the difficulty to identify the poor promotes a universal allocation of benefits. To address this question, this study examines the targeting performance of and access to a social welfare scheme for an increasingly vulnerable group – India’s poor older people. The results show that during a time period of social pension reforms, exclusion and inclusion errors were successfully reduced but the exclusion of poor older people continues to be extremely high. Comparing the existing targeting approach to a random allocation, I show that the benefits of targeting are limited. The reforms aimed at increasing the transparency of social pension allocation indeed made the Below Poverty Line ration card the most important determinant of access to social pensions for older people. However, this focus on the ration card promoted by the national government has its own weaknesses. Non-poor older people exploit the unwarranted possession of this ration card and results suggest that after the reforms individuals with direct connections to local government officials are more likely to access social pension benefits. The current targeting approach seems to be beneficial for well-connected older individuals while many poor older people typically lacking these connections lag behind.

In der Juniausgabe 2021 veröffentlichte der Wirtschaftsdienst einen Aufsatz mit dem Titel "Beitragsfinanzierung im "demografiegestressten" Rentensystem möglich" von Ernst Niemeier. Martin Werding vertritt in einer Replik eine andere Auffassung, im Anschluss erläutert Ernst Niemeier seinen Standpunkt in einer Erwiderung. In its June 2020 issue, Wirtschaftsdienst published an article entitled "Beitragsfinanzierung im "demografiegestressten" Rentensystem möglich" by Ernst Niemeier. Martin Werding takes a different view in a reply, and Ernst Niemeier explains his point of view in a response.

Redistribution across individuals within the framework of a one-year period is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across individuals. In this paper, we investigate to what extent long-run redistribution diverges from annual redistribution in welfare states of different types. Exploiting panel data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) for Australia, Germany, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we find that welfare states such as Germany that are assumed to engage in a high level of redistribution actually achieve relatively less redistribution between individuals in the long run than the United Kingdom or the United States. Regression results show that a higher share of elderly in a country is associated with more annual redistribution, but with less long-run redistribution between individuals. The results suggest that, in welfare states with aging populations, we might expect growing annual redistribution that, to a substantial extent, is in fact income smoothing for the elderly. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL

This paper focuses on the possibilities and functionalities offered by the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the UK - UKMOD to simulate and analyse the distributional impact of three examples of Basic Income schemes. We show how to build in functionalities to ensure fiscal neutrality and we aim to highlight some of the trade-offs that implementing a Basic Income scheme brings. This paper doesn't intend to engage with arguments around the desirability of introducing Basic Income but rather focuses on the options that UKMOD offers, giving a couple of examples of schemes based on a set of criteria described below.

Mental illness is a leading cause of disability worldwide with vast costs to society. Yet, insurance coverage for effective treatments remains limited. This paper revisits the Offset Hypothesis, which claims insurance coverage for psychotherapy is self-financing through reductions in the use of other health care services and improved labor market outcomes. I study a 2008 reform of the Danish public health care system that introduced 60 percent coverage of the cost of psychotherapy for depression and anxiety patients below age 38. Using Regression Discontinuity and Difference-in-Difference designs, I show that psychotherapy coverage reduces the use of other mental health services, physical health care and suicide attempts, but does not impact employment, sick leave or disability pension receipt. Still, the reduction in health care costs is sufficiently large to finance the policy. This suggests mental health coverage is both welfare improving and cost reducing.

This paper evaluates the potential of a common unemployment insurance system for the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU-UI) to improve income protection of atypical workers, namely those in part-time and temporary contracts. We use EUROMOD, the European tax-benefit microsimulation model, to simulate entitlements to national and EMU-UI and assess their effects on the household disposable income of atypical workers in the event of unemployment. Our results show that there are sizable gaps in the coverage of national UI schemes between countries, with atypical workers having particularly low coverage rates. The introduction of an EMU-UI would reduce coverage gaps and increase net replacement rates, especially for atypical workers, and would protect a large share of the workforce against the risk of poverty. Extending eligibility for the EMU-UI to the self-employed would further improve income protection, reducing their risk of falling into poverty in the event of unemployment.

The strong and increasing positive correlation between lifetime income and life expectancy (the longevity gap) has recently been widely studied. In this paper we employ the simplest, minimal model to demonstrate the impact of this long-neglected fact on the various types of public pension systems, especially on the issue of progressivity and neutrality.

Trotz des demografischen Wandels ist ein beitragsfinanziertes Rentensystem in Deutschland möglich und wünschenswert. Ein Rentenniveau von beispielsweise 50 % kann auch nach 2030 noch über Beiträge finanziert werden. Zum einen übersteigt die Produktivitäts- und Einkommensentwicklung die steigende Beitragsbelastung, sodass das Nettorealeinkommen trotz höherer Beiträge deutlich steigt. Außerdem müssen versicherungsfremde Leistungen sachgemäß durch Steuern und nicht durch Beiträge finanziert werden, um die Beitragshöhe zu begrenzen. Despite the aging demographic in Germany, retirement pensions are enough to finance pensioners' living expenses. The increase of the real income will exceed the burden of the increasing number of older people so that people of working age can bear the higher pension payments. Pensions that have been restrained due to political mistakes should be reimbursed out of taxes. General social programmes have to be financed by taxes, too.

This paper provides evidence that replacing minimum unemployment benefts with a basic income of equal size has minor employment effects at best. We examine an experiment in Finland in which 2,000 beneft recipients were randomized to receive a monthly basic income. The experiment lowered participation tax rates by 23pp for full-time employment. Despite the considerable increase in work incentives, days in employment remained statistically unchanged in the frst year of the experiment. Moreover, even though all job search requirements were waived, participation in reemployment services remained high.

Satellite data and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are a powerful combination for analyzing causal effects beyond traditional survey-based indicators. The usage of remotely collected data for evaluating RCTs is cost-effective, objective and possible for anyone with treatment assignment data. By re-evaluating one of the largest RCTs - the smartcard intervention of Muralidharan et al. (2016) covering 20 million people - with Indian nighttime luminosity, this paper finds that nightlights as a specific type of satellite data likely often are too noisy to evaluate RCTs. Building upon a post-treatment and a Difference-in-Differences approach, we do not find any statistically significant effects of the biometric smartcards on nightlights, contrasting Muralidharan et al. (2017)'s results of higher income level in treated areas. This can be mainly explained either with the noisiness-caused inability of nightlights to specifically capture economic effects or the absence of an increased economic activity due to a simple redistributive effect of the intervention. The former is more likely when looking at GDP implications of the noisiness in the luminosity data. Per head estimates, sensitivity checks for spillovers, subdistrict-level instead of village-level observations and different time-wise aggregations of nightlight data do not lead to changed results. Although limited with nightlights, nonetheless, the potential for re-evaluating RCTs with satellite data in general is enormous in three ways: (1) For confirming claimed treatment effects, (2) to understand additional impacts and (3) for cost-effectively understanding long-term impacts of interventions. Using daytime imagery for analyzing RCTs is a promising direction for future research.