published in: IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 2020, 10-17
In 2016 the Polish government introduced a large new child benefit, called "Family 500+", with the aim to increase fertility from a low level and reduce child poverty. The benefit is universal for the second and every further child and means-tested for the first child. Increasing out-of-work income significantly, the transfer can reduce incentives to participate in the labour market. We study the impact of the new benefit on female labour supply, using Polish Labour Force Survey data. Based on a difference-in-differences methodology we find that the labour market participation rates of women with children decreased after the introduction of the benefit compared to childless women. The estimates suggest that by mid-2017 the labour force participation rate of mothers dropped by 2-3 percentage points, depending on the estimation specification, as a result of the "Family 500+" benefit. The effect was higher among women with lower levels of education and living in small towns.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.