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We examine the effects of a quasi-experimental unconditional household income transfer on child emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Using longitudinal data, we find that there are large beneficial effects on children's emotional and behavioral health and personality traits during adolescence. We find evidence that these effects are most pronounced for children who start out with the lowest initial endowments. The income intervention also results in improvements in parental relationships which we interpret as a potential mechanism behind our findings.

If welfare stigma depends upon social attitudes, only the neediest apply for welfare when they can more easily be seen to do so. Using GoogleMaps' 'StreetView' feature, this article finds that the approval rate of applications for social assistance is higher in welfare offices with building characteristics that enhance the visibility of entry. A fitting explanation for this finding is that persons looking for social assistance dislike being thought of as 'welfare cases', and apply more conservatively when others can see it. The effects decline in the rate of poverty, suggesting that the self-reliance norm weakens as poverty increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluate the effect of an Austrian parental leave extension from the child's first to their second birthday on long-term child outcomes. Exploiting a sharp birthday cutoff-based discontinuity in the eligibility for extended leave, we find that longer parental leave improves on average child health outcomes, but has no effect on the child's labor market outcomes. When accounting for the counterfactual mode of care, we find significant gains in all outcomes for children for whom the reform most likely induced a replacement of informal childcare with maternal care. This highlights the importance of the counterfactual scenario in such evaluations. [End Page 1826] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of knowledge on the complex effects of social protection on poverty in Africa. This article explores the pros and cons of a multidisciplinary approach to studying social protection policies. Our research aimed at studying the interaction between cash transfers and social health protection policies in terms of their impact on inclusive growth in Ghana and Kenya. Also, it explored the policy reform context over time to unravel programme dynamics and outcomes. The analysis combined econometric and qualitative impact assessments with national- and local-level political economic analyses. In particular, dynamic effects and improved understanding of processes are well captured by this approach, thus, pushing the understanding of implementation challenges over and beyond a 'technological fix,' as has been argued before by Niño-Zarazúa et al. (World Dev 40:163–176, 2012), However, multidisciplinary research puts considerable demands on data and data handling. Finally, some poverty reduction effects play out over a longer time, requiring longitudinal consistent data that is still scarce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raising employment has been at the heart of EU strategies for over twenty years. Social investment, by now a widely debated topic in the comparative welfare state literature, has been suggested as a way to pursue this. However, there are only a couple of systematic comparative analyses that focus on the employment outcomes associated with social investment. Analyses of the interdependence of these policies with regard to their outcomes are even more scarce. We empirically analyse the extent to which variation in employment rates within 26 OECD countries over the period 1990-2010 can be explained by effort on five social investment policies. We additionally explore the role of policy and institutional complementarities. Using time-series cross-section analyses we find robust evidence for a positive association between effort on ALMPs and employment rates. For other policies we obtain mixed results. ALMPs are the only policies for which we observe signs of policy interdependence, which point at diminishing marginal returns. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that the interdependence of social investment policies varies across welfare state regimes. Together, this indicates that the employment outcomes of social investment policies are also contingent on the broader framework of welfare state policies and institutions. [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]

State-led financial inclusion programmes have been implemented in many developing countries, but their effectiveness in raising welfare remains widely debated. In this article, we report evidence on this issue, against the backdrop of recent policy initiatives on financial inclusion in India. We employ Theil's entropy-based index to estimate diversification in consumption expenditure, and use this as a measure of welfare. Using household-level panel data across all regions of the country, we find evidence that greater financial inclusion increases diversity in non-food items. Further, we also notice that there is a shift in consumption basket from food items to non-food items. These findings suggest an improvement in welfare for both rural as well as urban households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Background & aims: Recent evidences reveal that COVID-19 will have nontrivial results on the global economies. A balanced intervention is expected from policymakers to exploit the favorable effects of strong controlling actions on the health sector versus the possible economic and social impacts of those actions. The main objective of this study is to empirically quantify the household-level impacts of COVID-19 on food security, employment and education in Ethiopia. Methods: The study employed propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression methods relying on data collected by the World Bank using high-frequency phone call between April 22 and May 13, 2020 in Ethiopia. Results: The results of the study showed that COVID-19 reduced food security while at the same time adversely affected employment and schooling. The results also showed that the impact was significantly higher in reducing household's food security more than the other considered indicators. Furthermore, the results indicated that impacts vary disproportionally by different household groups, and each restriction is not equally important in affecting welfare. Conclusion: The pandemic has affected welfares significantly, though the impact disproportionally varies among the different outcomes. It is not, however, clear how these impacts may change over time. As the pandemic is in its early stage, the condition calls for more researches to be conducted with wider datasets that can fully capture the potential and long-term impacts of the pandemic. It is also clear that these findings point the need of immediate and medium-term policy responses to the spread of the pandemic. The results suggest that ongoing and future government responses should focus on structural changes in social security by developing responsive packages to fight poverty possibly caused by the pandemics and building strong financial institutions to support the recovery of businesses in the medium term, and ensuring the resilience of food supply chains. Finally, this study also sheds light on the effects that COVID-19 has on general welfare in the short-run and points some potential areas that need extra supports.

Research purpose. The study is focused on the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in the European Union. This study investigates the current driving trends and trade-offs of the Covid-19 pandemic phenomenon and social inclusion trends in the European countries.

The school meals program is the largest nutritional assistance program for school-aged children. Whereas program eligibility historically was determined by family income, recent reforms allow schools to offer free meals to all students. This work evaluates the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), the largest school-wide free meals program, on academic performance. I leverage within- and across-state variation in the timing of CEP participation and find universal free meals increases breakfast and lunch participation by 38 and 12 percent, respectively. Math performance improves in districts with baseline low free meal eligibility, particularly among racial/ethnic groups with low income-based participation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how national policy can spur entrepreneurial activity is central to entrepreneurship research. Over the past decade, there has been a limited set of research findings to suggest that social spending may increase entrepreneurship in addition to serving more direct social purposes. We examine the topic through the lens of market failure theory and Austrian economics. In accordance with the Austrian perspective, we theorize that social spending increases the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship, thereby decreasing the attractiveness of entrepreneurship in comparison to salaried employment. Drawing from a sample of 31 developed countries spanning 2004–2011, we investigate the effects of social spending on entrepreneurial attitudes and activity. Our results indicate that country level social spending negatively affects entrepreneurial activity, business ownership, and the public's view of entrepreneurship as a career choice. The findings suggest that social spending may be better suited for addressing social issues compared to spurring entrepreneurial attitudes or activity. Our findings have implications for both the entrepreneurship and national policy literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this research is to examine the effects of good management of local governments on individual subjective well-being (SWB). We define three dimensions of good governance at the municipal level: accountability, government efficiency and control of corruption. We use a large survey of individual welfare carried out in Spain in 2013 and 2018 and distinguish four potential drivers of SWB: socio-demographic factors, material conditions, quality of life and municipal governance. Individual QoL variables, such as social connections or health status are major drivers of SWB. To a lesser extent, the material conditions also have a significant impact. With respect to good governance, our results point to an immediate positive effect of government efficiency on individual SWB levels. In contrast, accountability, understood as transparency, does not seem to have a significant impact. Surprisingly, we find no immediate effect of corruption on reported SWB, but a very strong deferred impact.

The sustainable development goal #2 aims at ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Given the numbers of food insecure and malnourished people on the rise, the heterogeneity of nutritional statuses and needs, and the even worse context of COVID-19 pandemic, this has become an urgent challenge for food-related policies. This paper provides a comprehensive microsimulation approach to evaluate economic policies on food access, sufficiency (energy) and adequacy (protein, fat, carbohydrate) at household level. The improvement in market access conditions in Kenya is simulated as an application case of this method, using original insights from households' surveys and biochemical and nutritional information by food item. Simulation's results suggest that improving market access increases food purchasing power overall the country, with a pro-poor impact in rural areas. The daily energy consumption per capita and macronutrients intakes per capita increase at the national level, being the households with at least one stunted child under 5 years old, and poor households living areas outside Mombasa and Nairobi, those which benefit the most. The developed method and its Kenya's application contribute to the discussion on how to evaluate nutrition-sensitive policies, and how to cover most households suffering food insecurity and nutrition deficiencies in any given country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This paper analyses the inefficiency of social services targeting in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FB&H). Using official statistics microdata of the Household Budget Survey 2015, three models of social minimum in FB&H were constructed: extreme and general poverty, and the model with multidimensional poverty aspects. The analysis of features of poor household categories showed that the most vulnerable residents of FB&H are not beneficiaries of permanent financial assistance. The reason for such an inefficient targeting was recognized in the Federal Law on Principles of Social Care, Care for the War-Disabled Civilians and Care for Families with Children that stipulates that only persons and families that (cumulatively): are incapable for work, have insufficient income, and there are no family members who are legally obligated to support them. The results indicated a high inconsistency in the legal criteria for qualification, and also in the amounts of permanent social assistance among cantons. The Proxy Means Test (PMT) Model is offered as one of the possible solutions for the improvement of social services targeting in FB&H. Given the importance of efficiency of targeting in social services, the research results could be useful, for both, vulnerable segments of the society and federal and cantonal ministries of labour and social affairs, in the process of targeting the households qualified for social support programmes.

Customer preferences on the real estate market have been a topic of scientific research for decades. Recently, a lot of attention has been given to the issue of housing attitudes and needs of chosen groups of buyers. Among them, a particular increase in interest in real estate meeting the needs of the elderly and young buyers has been observed. However, Polish literature lacks a holistic analysis of consumer preferences through their entire lives.

The paper examined the effects of energy use on socioeconomic predictors in Africa. The Gary Becker hypothesis and the Michael Grossman demand for healthcare model were used to interact with energy related predictors on socioeconomic essentials. Our experimented model foretold the urgent need for government intervention programmes to resolve the energy misery in the African region.