Evaluation of the Finnish Income Disregard Reform

Heikki Palviainen
Additional contact information
Heikki Palviainen: Faculty of Management, University of Tampere

No 1819, Working Papers from Tampere University, Faculty of Management and Business, Economics

Abstract: In 2002, the Finnish government introduced an earnings disregard reform aimed at improving the incentives of low-income individuals who receive last-resort social assistance. The aim of the reform was to decrease unemployment by providing social assistance clients better incentives to receive at least temporary or part-time work. This paper evaluates the employment effects of the reform using a quasi-experimental design. After a behavioral adjustment period, there are positive results for females, single-person households and individuals with earnings. No effects on the extensive margin imply that a behavioural response requires some attachment to the labour market. No transition from social assistance to longer-term employment is observed.

Keywords: Difference-in-differences matching; making work pay; earnings disregard; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 H53 I38 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-0697-7 First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tam:wpaper:1819

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Tampere University, Faculty of Management and Business, Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sami Remes ().