Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants in Great Britain

Claire Crawford (), Lorraine Dearden (), Alice Mesnard (), Barbara Sianesi and Jonathan Shaw
Additional contact information
Claire Crawford: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE; Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.
Alice Mesnard: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE

No 10-07, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority and White claimants, both before and after controlling for rich observable characteristics. We do so using a variety of methods, from OLS to propensity score matching to difference-in-differences. We find that, in many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated, and that results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For Income Support and Incapacity Benefit claimants, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. For these groups, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.

Keywords: Non-response; bias; school survey; data linkage; PISA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2010-06-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.ucl.ac.uk/REPEc/pdf/qsswp1007.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:qss:dqsswp:1007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, 55-59 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0NU. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Neus Bover Fonts ().