Volume 26, Number 3 (Summer) 1991
Ermisch, John F. and Robert E. Wright. 1991. "Welfare Benefits and Lone Parents' Employment in Great Britain." Journal of Human Resources 26(3):424-456.
The analysis pools ten years of General Household Surveys to identify the effects of Britain's welfare benefit system on a lone mother's probability of employment. It confirms the prediction that, because of the implicit 100 percent tax rate in the system, higher nonlabor income (other than welfare benefits) increases the probability while a higher benefit guarantee reduces it. The analysis also confirms that among women who could never be eligible for benefits, higher nonlabor income reduces the probability of employment and the guarantee has no effect.
John F. Ermisch is the Bonar-Macfie Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. Robert E. Wright is research fellow at Birkbeck College, the University of London. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support for the research in the paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council. They are also indebted to three anonymous referees and to Ian Walker for their valuable comments. The data used in this article can be obtained directly from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Data Archive at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, and an ASCII file with the program used to create the exact variables used in our analysis can be obtained beginning February 1992 through February 1995 from John Ermisch at the following address: Department of Political Economy, Adams Smith Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RT.
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