Inter-generational effects of disability benefits: evidence from Canadian social assistance programs

Individuals with disabilities face greater challenges in the labor market than able-bodied individuals, and a growing body of research is finding that their children also tend to have more developmental problems than the children of able-bodied parents. Can transfer payments help reduce this gap? In this paper, we present the first evidence on how parental disability benefits affect the well-being of children. Using changes in real benefits under ten disability benefit programs in Canada as an identification strategy and Statistics Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) as the data source on child outcomes, we find strong evidence that higher benefits lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, as measured by math scores in standardized tests, hyperactive symptoms, and emotional anxiety behavior. The effect is larger on children with a disabled mother than on those with a disabled father.     

International Comparisons of Trends in Economic Well-being

This paper develops a new measure of economic well-being for selectedOECD countries for the period 1980 to 1996 and compares trends in thisnew Index to GDP per capita. We argue that the economic well-being ofa society depends on the level of average consumption flows, aggregateaccumulation of productive stocks, inequality in the distribution ofindividual incomes and insecurity in the anticipation of future income.However, the weights attached to each component will vary, dependingon the values of different observers. We argue that public debatewould be improved if there is explicit consideration of theaspects of economic well-being obscured by average income trends andif the weights attached to these aspects were made visible and wereopen for discussion.     

A distribution-free test for deprivation dominance

The Raw1sian perspective on social policy pays particular attentionto the least advantaged members of society, but how should "the least advantaged" be identified? The concept of deprivation dominance operationalizes in part the Rawlsian evaluation of the welfare of the least advantaged members of society, but a statistical procedure for testing deprivation dominance is needed. In this paper, we construct a new distribution-free test for deprivation dominance and apply i t to Canadian income survey data