Fighting Lone Mothers' Poverty through in-Work Benefits - Methodological Issues and Policy Suggestions
CESifo, Munich, 2013
CESifo Working Paper No. 4375
Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone mothers’ labour supply and a small reduction in poverty. Is the best result that policy makers could obtain in terms of poverty reduction? In this paper, I estimate a discrete choice model of earnings and welfare participation decisions, and use the behavioural estimates to derive the policy parameters which would have minimized poverty among lone mothers.
Labour Markets
Empirical and Theoretical Methods