How Do Exit Rates from Social Assistance Benefit in Belgium Vary with Individual and Local Agency Characteristics?
Safety Nets and Benefit Dependence
ISBN: 978-1-78190-936-2, eISBN: 978-1-78441-110-7
Publication date: 6 August 2014
Abstract
The administration of social assistance benefits is devolved to local agencies in Belgium, which raises questions about how much variation in spell lengths of benefit receipt is associated with differences across agencies. We address this issue by analysing the monthly hazard of benefit exit using administrative record data for 14,270 individuals in 574 welfare agencies. Our random-effects model allows for differences in both the observed and unobserved characteristics of beneficiaries and of local agencies. There are large differences in median benefit duration for individuals serviced by different welfare agencies: the range is from two months to more than 24 months. We find strong associations between beneficiary characteristics (sex, age, foreign nationality, citizenship acquisition, work history and being a student) and spell length. The estimates show higher odds of exiting social assistance receipt in bigger municipalities and in agencies which provide more generous supplementary assistance, and also strong evidence of shorter episodes in agencies where active labour market programme participation rates are higher.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the referees and editors for their detailed and constructive comments and suggestions, which were extremely helpful when revising the article. We thank also Koen Decancq, Tim Goedemé, Bea Cantillon, Michaela Pfeifer, Eva Lefevere, Chiara Saraceno, Birgitte-Pfau Effinger, Natascha Van Mechelen, Sarah Marchal, Bettina Leibetseder, Berenice Storms, Marjolijn De Wilde and Olivier Pintelon for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ISA Annual RC 19 Meeting (Oslo, 23–25 August 2012), the IZA/OECD/World Bank Conference on Safety Nets and Benefit Dependence: Evidence and Policy Implications (Paris, 21–22 May 2013) and the Young Researchers Conference ‘Local Welfare Systems and Female Labour Market Participation’ (Hamburg, 19–20 September 2013). The authors thank participants of those conferences for useful comments. We also extend our thanks to George Leckie for his assistance with the runmlwin module for Stata (Leckie & Charlton, 2013).
Citation
Carpentier, S., Neels, K. and Van den Bosch, K. (2014), "How Do Exit Rates from Social Assistance Benefit in Belgium Vary with Individual and Local Agency Characteristics?", Safety Nets and Benefit Dependence (Research in Labor Economics, Vol. 39), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 151-187. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0147-912120140000039004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited