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Many countries have a two-tiered unemployment compensation system that provides earnings-related unemployment insurance for a limited period of time and less generous unemployment assistance thereafter. This study evaluates the effects of a reform in Finland that increased the level of unemployment assistance by 22%. The reform led to a drop of 9% in the unemployment exit hazard, which can be attributed to fewer exits to both employment and inactivity. The implied elasticities suggest that a 10% increase in unemployment assistance reduces the unemployment exit hazard by 4% and the job-finding hazard by 6%. These effects are relatively small compared to the existing evidence on the effects of unemployment insurance benefits.

Cross-country research argues that the design of welfare states and social protection systems shapes the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Studies that examine this relationship within a country are however lacking from the literature. Based on a quasi-experimental research design using difference-in-differences estimation and data from the Socio-Economic Panel, I analyse whether the educational disadvantage of children of long-term unemployment assistance recipients increased after changes to eligibility criteria, benefit levels, and conditionality were introduced in Germany in 2005. I find that differences in the probability to enter the academic secondary school track between children of parents receiving long-term unemployment assistance one year before the transition and children of parents not receiving unemployment or social benefits increased by 13 percentage points. In part, this was driven by the introduction of means-testing that changed the composition of unemployment assistance recipients. However, further decreases in the financial conditions of these already disadvantaged families following reductions in benefit levels appear as the main driver of the observed effect. Changes in parental subjective wellbeing due to increased benefit conditionality and stigma do not seem to play a significant mediating role. The findings highlight the important contribution of social policy to social mobility and equality of opportunity.

Before the introduction of the household benefit cap in the UK in 2013 the previous mechanism there limited the income of social assistance recipients was the wage stop, operating for four decades between 1935 and 1975. Similar to the benefit cap, the wage stop reflected and reproduced concerns with incentivising unemployed people to labour. This raises questions about why the wage stop was abolished in the mid-1970s when worries about unemployment continued, particularly its intersections with out-of-work benefits. It is widely argued that the abolition of the wage stop was a consequence of lobbying by the Child Poverty Action Group. Drawing upon records held at the UK’s National Archives, this article argues that this is an over-simplified explanation that, first, ignores concerns with the wage stop that pre-dated the Child Poverty Action Group’s criticism of it, including concerns within the assistance boards with its administration. And, second, while by the mid-1970s there was (albeit ambiguous) concern with the impacts of the wage stop, there was a shift in approach that emphasised the supplementation of low wages with social security benefits, rather than forcing social assistance below the assessed needs of households, as being a preferable means of ensuring the incentive to take wage-labour.

The results of the review do not disappoint. The authors identified more than 120 cash transfer programs that were implemented between 2000 and mid-2009 in Sub-Saharan Africa. These programs have varying objectives, targeting, scale, conditions, technologies, and more. A sizable number of these programs conducted robust impact evaluations that provide important information, presented here, on the merits of cash transfer programs and their specific design features in the African context. The authors present summary information on programs, often in useful graphs, and provide detailed reference material in the appendixes. They highlight how many of the cash transfer programs in Africa that had not yet begun implementation at the time of writing will continue to provide important evaluation results that will guide the design of cash transfer programs in the region. In addition to presenting data and analysis on the mechanics of the programs, the authors discuss issues related to political economy. They highlight the importance of addressing key tradeoffs in cash transfers, political will, and buy-in, and they emphasize the need to build evidence-based debates on cash transfer programs. Useful anecdotes and discussion illustrate how some programs have dealt with these issues with varying degrees of success. This text will serve as a useful reference for years to come for those interested in large- and small-scale issues of cash transfer implementation, both in Africa and beyond. However, the book is not an end in itself. It also raises important questions that must be addressed and knowledge gaps that must be filled. Therefore, it is useful both in the information it provides and in the issues and questions it raises.

Slow progress in improving the coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean's (LAC's) traditional social protection (SP) programs, combined with the deepening of democracy, have led to calls for a new social contract to provide effective social protection to all citizens. This book highlights the main findings of a regional study by the World Bank, from right to reality: how Latin America and the Caribbean can achieve universal social protection by improving redistribution and adapting programs to labor markets. The report analyzes LAC's social insurance (SI) systems and highlights growing concerns about the incentives they may create and the behaviors they may incite on the part of workers, employers and service providers. It offers an economic analysis of the roots of these problems and suggests a way forward to achieve universal coverage in an equitable manner. The report argues that a coherent overall vision for the SP system should be established if such problems are to be understood and resolved. The goal is to turn the theoretical right to social protection, which is enshrined in many of the region's constitutions and laws, into a reality for all of LAC's population. A central message of the report is that SP systems need to respond to the realities of LAC's labor markets, especially the prevalence of informality and frequent changes of employment.

The paper analyzes the wage-employment effects of replacing unemployment benefits by negative income taxes. It first surveys the major equity and efficiency effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes, and summarizes the salient features of many European unemployment benefit systems in this light. Second, it presents a simple theoretical model that focuses on the relative wage-employment effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes. Finally, it provides some empirical groundwork for assessing this relative effect.

Disasters periodically occur requiring large amounts of relief aid from the United States government to help citizens, businesses, and communities recover. Criminals are attracted to the monetary outlays and attempt to divert funds through fraudulent means. The level of fraud occurring depends upon the strength of internal controls within the relief aid programs. The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the worst disasters in the history of the United States. To reduce the impact from the pandemic on the economy and help citizens and businesses, the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Stability (CARES) Act was enacted by the federal government in March 2020. However, an estimated $100 billion or more in fraud is associated with the relief aid and benefit programs under the CARES Act. This project intended to answer the following questions: What are examples and patterns of relief aid fraud arising from the COVID-19 pandemic crisis? What gaps exist in the structures of benefit relief programs that provide the opportunity for fraud? What should government agencies, who provide relief benefits in response to a crisis, do to mitigate the risk of benefit fraud occurring in a future crisis? Disasters prior to the COVID-19 pandemic show patterns of fraud as well as lessons learned on how to mitigate the risk of fraud. However, the relief aid programs funded under the CARES Act were not adequately designed to deter fraud, resulting in large losses due to fraud. Keywords: Financial Crime and Compliance Management, Professor Carmen Mercado, economic injury disaster loan, paycheck protection program, pandemic unemployment assistance, unemployment insurance.

This paper traces the development of state financial provision for unemployed people in Britain in the period of persistently high unemployment between the First and Second World Wars; the measures taken to extend the duration of unemployment benefit entitlement beyond the period justified by contributions, undermining the finances of the insurance scheme and leading to the creation of a separate system of means-tested assistance; and the problems encountered in introducing such a system based on a uniform national assessment of needs.

This study analyzes the performance of social assistance and family benefit programs in eight new member states of the European Union from the perspective of fiscal impact and effectiveness. It is based on household survey data for six of the countries, as well as budget data and information on program design collected at the national level. The paper finds that, although social assistance programs in the new member states are small in terms of coverage and expenditure levels (reaching 2 to 5 percent of the population), the programs are an important safety net for the poor. Programs are relatively well targeted, with between 30 and 60 percent of resources going to the poorest quintile of the population. For those who receive them, benefits can make up as much as 37 percent of average consumption of the poor.

Throughout the developed and developing world there is growing demand for policies that would facilitate access to jobs by the most vulnerable, improve their earnings, and reduce their dependency on public support. As a result, governments are increasingly focused on removing obstacles faced by employers to create jobs and on instilling incentives for individuals to re-enter the labor market or to move toward more productive employment possibilities. Severance pay a program compensating formal workers for dismissal by employers or with an end-of-service benefit is often blamed for distorting employer hiring and firing decisions. Together with restrictive labor market regulations and other formal labor market features, this program is held responsible for excessive job protection with a negative impact on labor market outcomes, in particular affecting the most vulnerable. Despite this strong negative assessment among many labor market economists, surprisingly little is known about this program that exists in most countries around the world as a legally mandated benefit. This lack of knowledge may derive from the special 'positioning' of the program between labor code and social insurance; its origins were in the first policy domain, but its objectives for key programs were replicated in the second domain in particular unemployment and retirement benefits. This is the first-ever book to shed light on this program in a comprehensive manner its historical origins, its rationale, and its characteristics across the world. It reviews the soundness of the empirical accusation, assesses recent country reforms, and offers policy reform alternatives and policy guidance. The policy directions include folding severance pay into existing social insurance programs, where they exist, and to make severance pay contractual between market partners as a way to enhance efficiency in a knowledge-based economy. Folding severance pay into employment benefits may also be an opportunity to move away from unemployment insurance, which is fraught by moral hazard, toward a promising 'hybrid' system of unemployment insurance savings accounts supplemented by social pooling.