Overview

Abstract (English)

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian research and demonstration project that investigated how to “make work pay,” by supplementing the earnings of long-term income assistance (IA) recipients. The long-term goal of SSP was to get lone parents permanently off income assistance and into the paid labour force. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the short-term and long-term impact of SSP on the duration of employment and unemployment. This paper focuses on generating estimates of the “effect of the treatment on the treated” where the “treated” are those in the program group who actually received an SSP supplement (take-up program group). Following the work of Ham and LaLonde (1996) this paper estimates a joint model of unemployment and employment durations that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and non-random selection into work. This provides an unbiased estimate of the impact of SSP on unemployment and employment durations, and finds evidence of significant short-term impacts of SSP on unemployment and employment durations. It is also found that SSP appears to have a long-term positive impact on the employment rate of the take-up program group. This appears to be due to the long-term decrease in the probability of exit from employment for take-up program group members.

Abstract (French)

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