Assessing the Impact of a Wage Subsidy for Single Parents on Social Assistance

Guy Lacroix

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: In 2002 the Quebec government implemented the "Action Emploi" (AE) program aimed at making work pay for long-term social assistance recipients (SA). AE o ered a generous wage subsidy that could last up to three years to recipients who found a full-time job within twelve months. The program was implemented on an experimental basis for a single year. Based on little empirical evidence, a slightly modi ed version of the program was implemented on permanent basis in May 2008. The paper investigates the impact of the temporary program by focusing on the labour market transitions of the targeted population starting one year before the implementation of the program and up until the end of 2005. We use a multi-state multi-episode model. The endogeneity of the participation status is accounted for by treating AE as a distinct state and by allowing correlated unobserved factors to a ect the transitions. The model is estimated by the method of simulated moments. Our results show that AE has indeed increased the duration of O -SA spells and decreased the duration of SA spells slightly. There is also some evidence that the response to the program varies considerably with unobserved individual characteristics.

Keywords: Wage subsidy; multi-state multi-episode transition model; social assistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J31 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2009-06-22, Revised 2009-06-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the impact of a wage subsidy for single parents on social assistance (2011)
Working Paper: Assessing the Impact of a Wage Subsidy for Single Parents on Social Assistance (2010)
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