The Pitfalls of Work Requirements in Welfare-to-Work Policies: Experimental Evidence on Human Capital Accumulation in the Self-Sufficiency Project

This paper investigates whether policies that encourage recipients to exit welfare for full-time employment influence participation in educational activity. The Self-Sufficiency Project ('SSP') was a demonstration project where long-term welfare recipients randomly assigned to the treatment group were offered a generous earnings supplement if they exited welfare for full-time employment. We find that treatment group members were less likely to upgrade their education along all dimensions: high-school completion, enrolling in a community college or trade school, and enrolling in university. Thus, 'work-first'; policies that encourage full-time employment may reduce educational activity and may have adverse consequences on the long-run earnings capacity of welfare recipients. We also find that there was a substantial amount of educational upgrading in this population. For instance, among high-school dropouts at the baseline, 19% completed their diploma by the end of the demonstration. Finally, we simulate the consequences of the earnings supplement in the absence of adverse effects on educational upgrading. Doing so alters the interpretation of the lessons from the SSP demonstration.welfare policy, human capital, experimental methods, earnings supplementation

Measuring Unemployment and Structural Unemployment

This paper surveys recent research on how to measure labour market activities such as unemployment and labour force participation. The conventional approach to distinguishing between unemployment and non-participation is to use a priori reasoning and self-reported survey responses about current activities, specifically availability for work and job search. In contrast, the research surveyed here employs evidence on the subsequent consequences of current activities, in particular on transitions among labour force states. This general approach appears to be a promising method for bringing evidence to bear on these difficult measurement issues.

Economic Change and Worker Displacement in Canada: Consequences and Policy Responses

Change is an enduring feature of the economy and the labour market, even in normal times. The importance of adjusting to change, and of policies that promote adjustment, has been a recurring theme throughout David Dodge’s distinguished career. This paper deals with “displaced workers,†those who permanently lose their jobs because of changing economic circumstances. I examine what we know about displacement and its consequences, and assess policies designed to assist workers adversely affected by economic change. A central finding of research on displacement is that long tenure displaced workers -- those who have held their jobs for an extended period of time -- suffer much more from losing their jobs than do others. Canada’s Employment Insurance does not take into account this salient feature of the consequences of job loss. The paper discusses ways of addressing this deficiency in our primary social insurance program for job losers.labour market adjustment, job displacement, unemployment, unemployment insurance, adjustment assistance policies, wage insurance

Evaluating prose style transfer with the Bible

In the prose style transfer task a system, provided with text input and a target prose style, produces output which preserves the meaning of the input text but alters the style. These systems require parallel data for evaluation of results and usually make use of parallel data for training. Currently, there are few publicly available corpora for this task. In this work, we identify a high-quality source of aligned, stylistically distinct text in different versions of the Bible. We provide a standardized split, into training, development and testing data, of the public domain versions in our corpus. This corpus is highly parallel since many Bible versions are included. Sentences are aligned due to the presence of chapter and verse numbers within all versions of the text. In addition to the corpus, we present the results, as measured by the BLEU and PINC metrics, of several models trained on our data which can serve as baselines for future research. While we present these data as a style transfer corpus, we believe that it is of unmatched quality and may be useful for other natural language tasks as well

Foreign direct investment in sub-Saharan Africa

The authors of this paper examine trends in private foreign direct investment in sub - Saharan Africa, assess how this has affected the host economies, and discuss the prospects for increased investment in the 1990s. They examine new or nontraditional forms of investment as well as more traditional stock and flow trends. They also focus on the relationship between structural adjustment programs and foreign private investment. Foreign investment in the 1990s (as in the 1980s) is likely to flow to a few key sectors: energy, selected export manufacturing sectors, and possibly the tourist industry. The least attractive area for the foreign investor is exclusively import-substituting industrialization. Interested investors are more likely to commit technology and management than equity capital. As a result, development finance institutions are likely to play an increasingly important role in meeting the need for capital. Thus, activity in sub - Saharan Africa may be more effective at raising the total volume of investment than any change in the climate of fiscal and other incentives. There is no prospect whatsoever for foreign investment to meet sub - Saharan Africa's rising foreign exchange and savings gaps. For one thing, prospects in other parts of the rapidly changing world look brighter and less risky and are closer to home. For another (Catch 22), sub - Saharan Africa is unlikely to attract capital until the prospects for growth improve.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration,ICT Policy and Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies