Labour market policy evaluations

Welfare-to-work programmes often involve multiple features and incentives. Disentangling the impacts of these different features is key to successful policy design but requires high-quality data on individuals’ benefit receipt and behaviour. MISoC’s Mike Brewer led two projects using administrative data on lone parents (a key group of interest to policy makers) to examine the impact of welfare-to-work programmes on their decisions to work and claim benefits.

The first project compared two in-work benefits – In-Work Credit and the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration – which are both intended to promote short- and medium-run job retention (Brewer and Cribb, 2016). By reconciling and synthesising the evidence on the two benefits, the project identified which specific features of those policies are the most likely to foster job retention for lone parents.

The second project investigated the impact of “work activation” on lone parents receiving out-of-work benefits. It examined how outcomes for successive cohorts of lone parents changed as the eligibility conditions for claiming Income Support were altered between 2008 and 2011 (Avram et al., 2016).