A Helping Hand Goes a Long Way: Long-Term Effects of Counselling and Support to Workfare Program Participants

Gustavo Bobonis, Aneta Bonikowska, Philip Oreopoulos, W. Craig Riddell and Steven P. Ryan

No 30405, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the medium- and long-run impacts of the Canada Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) Plus program, which randomly offered intensive employment support services for up to three years to long-term welfare recipients eligible for temporary work subsidies. We examine whether this intervention – aiming to address both economic and psychosocial barriers faced by the poor in finding and retaining desirable employment – led to long-run changes in individuals’ socioeconomic trajectories. We link study participants to their federal tax and employer-employee matched records for up to 20 years after random assignment. The intensive services treatment led to a 20-27 percent increase in participants’ annual earnings over the 20-year period and increases in full-time employment throughout the first decade post-intervention. As possible mechanisms, individuals engage in more job search and job-to-job transitions and obtain jobs paying higher wages and in higher paying firms.

JEL-codes: I3 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30405.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:30405

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30405

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().